Chapter 56

JOHN AND I MET that night for a little light sparring at the Roxy Gym after my last therapy session. The practice was building steadily, and my days there made me happy and satisfied for the first time in a few years.

The quaint idea of normality was in my head a lot now, though I'm not sure what the word really meant.

"Get your elbows in," Sampson said, "before I knock your damn head off."

I pulled them in. It didn't help much, though.

The big man caught me with a good right jab that stung like only a solid punch can. I swung and connected solidly with his open side, which seemed to hurt my hand more than it hurt him.

It went on like that for a while, but my mind never really got into the ring. After less than twenty minutes, I held up my gloves, feeling an ache in both shoulders.

"TKO," I said through my mouthpiece. "Let's go get a drink."

Our "drink" turned out to be bottles of red Gatorade on the sidewalk in front of the Roxy. Not what I'd had in mind, but it was just fine.

"So," Sampson said, "either I'm getting a whole lot better in there or you were out of it tonight. Which is it?"

"You aren't getting better," I deadpanned.

"Still thinking about yesterday? What? Talk to me."

We both had felt lousy about the tough interview with Lisa Brandt. It's one thing to push a witness like that and get somewhere; it's another to probe hard and get nothing out of it.

I nodded. "Yesterday, yeah."

Sampson slid down the wall to sit next to me on the sidewalk. "Alex, you've got to get off the worry train."

"Nice bumper sticker," I told him.

"I thought things were going pretty good for you," he said. "Lately anyway."

"They are," I said. "The work is good, even better than I thought it would be."

"So what's the problem then? Too much of a good thing? What ails you, man?"

In my mind, there was the long answer and the short answer. I went for the short answer. "Maria."

He knew what I meant, knew why too. "Yesterday reminded you of her?"

"Yeah. In a weird way, it did," I said. "I was thinking. You remember back around the time when she was killed? There was a serial rape going on then, too. Remember that?"

Sampson squinted into the air. "Right, now that you mention it."

I rubbed my sore knuckles together. "Anyway, that's what I mean. It's all like two degrees of separation these days. Everything I think about reminds me of Maria. Everything I do brings me back to her murder case. I kind of feel like I'm living in purgatory, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that."

Sampson waited for me to finish. He usually knows when his point has been made and when to shut up. He had nothing more to say at the moment. Finally, I took a deep breath, and we rose and started up the sidewalk.

"What do you hear about Maria's killer? Anything new?" I asked him. "Or was Giametti just playing with us?"

"Alex, why don't you move on?"

"John, if I could move on, I would. Okay? Maybe this is how I do it."

He stared at his shoes for half a block. When he finally answered, it was begrudgingly. "If I find out something about her killer, you'll be the first to know."

Chapter 57

MICHAEL SULLIVAN HAD STOPPED taking shit from anybody when he was fourteen or fifteen years old. Everybody in his family knew that his grandpa James had a gun and that he kept it in the bottom drawer of the dresser in his bedroom. One afternoon in June, the week that school got out for him, Sullivan broke in and stole the gun from his grandfather's apartment.

For the rest of the day, he moseyed around the neighborhood with the pistola stuck in his pants, concealed under a loose shirt. He didn't feel the need to show off the weapon to anybody, but he found that he liked having it, liked it a lot. The handgun changed everything for him. He went from a tough kid to an invincible one.

Sullivan hung out until around eight; then he made his way along Quentin Road to his father's shop. He got there when he knew that the old man would be closing up.

A song he hated, Elton John's "Crocodile Rock," was on somebody's car radio down the block, and he was tempted to shoot whoever was playing that shit.

The butcher shop's front door was open, and when he waltzed in, his father didn't even look up – but he must have seen his son pass the window outside.

The usual stack of Irish Echo newspapers was by the door. Everything always in its goddamn place. Neat, tidy, and completely messed-up.

"Whattaya want?" his father growled. The broom he was using had a scraper blade to dislodge fat from the grout on the floor. It was the kind of scut work Sullivan hated.

"Have a talk with you?" he said to his father.

"Fuck off. I'm busy earning a living."

"Oh. Is that right? Busy cleaning floors?" Then his arm swung out fast.

And that was the first time Sullivan hit his father – with the gun – in the temple over his right eye. He hit him again, in the nose, and the large man went down into the sawdust and meat shavings. He began to moan and spit out sawdust and gristle.

" You know how badly I can hurt you?" Michael Sullivan bent low to the floor and asked his father. "Remember that line, Kevin? I do. Never forget it as long as I live."

"Don't call me Kevin, you punk."

He hit his father again with the gun handle. Then he kicked him in the testicles, and his father groaned in pain.

Sullivan looked around the store with total contempt. Kicked over a stand of McNamara's soda bread, just to kick something. Then he put the gun to his old man's head and cocked it.

"Please," his father gasped, and his eyes went wide with shock and fear and some kind of bizarre realization about who his son was. "No. Don't do this. Don't, Michael."

Sullivan pulled the trigger – and there was a loud snap of metal against metal.

But no deafening explosion. No brain-splattering gunshot. Then there was powerful silence, like in a church.

"Someday," he told his father. "Not today, but when you least expect it. One day when you don't want to die, I'm going to kill you. You're gonna have a hard death, too, Kevin. And not with a pop gun like this one."

Then he walked out of the butcher shop, and he became the Butcher of Sligo. Three days before Christmas of his eighteenth year, he came back and killed his father. As he'd promised, not with a gun. He used one of the old man's boning knives, and he took several Polaroid shots as a keepsake.

Chapter 58

OUT IN MARYLAND, where he lived nowadays, Michael Sullivan shouldered a baseball bat. Not just any bat, either, a vintage Louisville Slugger, a 1986 Yankees game bat, to be exact. Screw collector's items, though, this solid piece of ash was meant to be used.

"All right," Sullivan called out to the pitcher's mound. "Let's see what you can do, big man. I'm shaking in my boots here. Let's see what you got."

It was hard to believe that Mike Junior was old enough to have a windup this fluid and good, but he did. And his changeup was a small masterpiece. Sullivan only recognized it coming because he'd taught the pitch to the boy himself.

Still, he wasn't handing his eldest son any charity. That would be an insult to the boy. He gave the pitch the extra fraction of a second it needed, then swung hard and connected with a satisfying crack of the bat. He pretended the ball was the head of John Maggione.

"And she's out of here!" he crowed. He ran the bases for show while Seamus, his youngest, scrambled over the ballpark's chain-link fence to retrieve the home-run ball. "Good one, Dad!" he screamed, holding up the scuffed ball where it had landed.

"Dad, we should go." His middle son, Jimmy, already had his catcher's mitt and face mask off. "We've got to leave the house by six thirty. Remember, Dad?"