Small Mercies

“She mighta punctured a fucking lung,” Pat Kearns says.

“Bring him to the doc on G,” Brian says. “Make sure the doc knows he don’t get the Cadillac treatment. This one’s a Dodge. A used Dodge.”

They start to drag him out.

Brian says, “The fucking back door, you dumb fucks.”

They drag him in the other direction. Eventually, they reach the back door and beyond, and the bar noise returns to normal, which, as Mary Pat has always read it, feels itchy and fearful but gives off a pleasant hum nonetheless.

“This is no little thing, Mary Pat.”

She downs her second shot of the night, looks Brian in the eyes. “I know.”

“You started a fight in Marty’s place. His sanctuary.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” she says.

“Oh, no?”

She shakes her head. “That was a beatdown. That little pussy didn’t get one shot in.”

“You can’t do beatdowns in Marty’s place. If you were a fucking guy, you’d be dead. Or, you know, at least in a body cast.”

“So put me in a body cast, but wait until after I find my daughter.”

He narrows his eyes. Downs his own shot. “Jules?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s she at?”

“That’s my question. No one’s seen her since last night.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did.” She jerks her thumb at the blood and vomit Rum left in his wake. “To him.”

He grimaces. “That fucking putz? Asking him for information is like asking a telephone pole for a steak and cheese.” He points two fingers at his own chest. “We help. We provide services to this neighborhood. We coulda been looking for Jules all day if you’d asked. No one forgets what you did for us, what Dukie did for us — we’re here for you, Mary Pat.” He takes out a small notepad and a pencil. Licks the tip of the pencil as he opens the notepad on the bar. “Tell me everything you know.”

After she finishes, he says, “I’ll square what you did here tonight with Marty.” He puts the notebook and pencil back in the pocket of his Baracuta. “But you gotta give us twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

“It’s not gonna take that. It’s probably gonna take, like, three, but you can’t be running around like Billy Jack — fuckin’ Mary Pat Jack — beating the fuck out of people. You can’t do it. It’s gonna bring attention.”

“I can’t sit on my hands for twenty-four hours.”

He exhales loudly. “Then give us till, say, five tomorrow. A full day. Give us that long to find her for you. You don’t rattle any cages, you sure as shit don’t go to the fuckin’ cops, you let us work for you.”

She lights a cigarette, turns it between her fingers, round and round. Closes her eyes. “That’s a lot to ask.”

“I know it is. But with this busing bullshit and that spook getting himself killed last night, we don’t need one more outside eye looking into this neighborhood. Because they might start asking how it really runs, how things really get done, and we cannot have that, Mary Pat. We absolutely cannot.”

She looks around the bar, can feel that everyone was just looking at them and are now pretending they weren’t. She looks back at Brian Shea. “Five o’clock tomorrow. That’s my good-girl-behavior limit.”

Brian signals Tommy for another round. “Fair enough.”

6

She doesn’t sleep more than three hours all night, and none of that sleep strings together but arrives instead in fifteen-minute blocks followed by alert anguish, staring into the black, fidgety and hopeless, followed by another fifteen-minute spurt of sleep two hours later, followed by staring into the black.

Lying in bed, staring up at the dark, she feels seen but not heard by whatever looks down upon her. Eventually, its eyes leave her, and she is alone in the universe.

At work she’s a zombie, stumbling through her shift, hoping no patient codes on her because she won’t be up to the task. Again Dreamy takes a personal day, so again they’re shorthanded. Gossip flies up and down the corridors — Auggie Williamson committed suicide. No, he OD’d and fell in front of a train. There are witnesses, but they haven’t come forward. He was chased onto the platform. It was a drug deal gone bad and he tried to run, slipped on the platform, and fell in front of a train. Ker-runch.

But none of the rumors addresses how it is that the train conductor never noticed the impact. Maybe he hadn’t seen Auggie, but he must have felt the impact. It was in all the papers that Auggie died somewhere between midnight and one, but his body wasn’t found until the morning commute, tucked under the platform. So, what’s it like to get off your shift, go home and sleep eight hours, then wake to the news that you drove your subway car into someone’s head? The poor guy, someone says, he has to live with that the rest of his life.

After work, Mary Pat changes out of her uniform in the locker room and puts on the clothes she arrived in, and then she does something she doesn’t even admit to herself she’s doing until she’s crossing over the Charles River on the Red Line — she takes the subway to Cambridge.