Small Mercies

Tovah cocks her head at him. “Hey, Bobby. How you been?”

“Been good, Tovah. You?”

“Never better. Still living at Mommy and Daddy’s house?” Before Bobby can answer, she turns back to Brenda. “So you weren’t Mirandized.”

“What?”

“Did anyone say the words ‘You are under arrest’ to you?”

“No.”

“Then we can go.”

“Right now?”

“Right now, sweetheart.”

As Brenda stands, she chin-gestures at Vincent. “He hit me.”

Tovah whistles slowly, says to Vincent, “With complaints already pending against you? Oh, Vinny, you make it so easy.”

Bobby holds up the photo of Auggie Williamson in front of Brenda. Brenda looks and then quickly looks away. “He was a human being, Brenda. You know what happened to him. We can offer you a deal.”

Tovah gives that a sharp laugh. “You have to be able to charge someone with something, Bobby, before you offer a deal.”

“We’ll make that happen real soon.”

Tovah rolls her smoky eyes at him. Everything about Tovah is smoky. Smoky and sexy as hell — the way she moves, the way she laughs, the way she chews her bottom lip before she delivers one bomb or another.

“You’ve got nothing.” She searches his eyes for confirmation.

Bobby hopes he’s giving her dead eyes in return. He’s trying like hell. “We’ve got plenty.”

Her eyes keep searching his. Roving. If she keeps it up much longer, he’ll need a cold shower. “I repeat — you’ve got nothing.”

They exit the interview room and find Rum Collins standing in the hallway alongside Boon Fletcher of Fletcher, Shapiro, Dunn & Levine. Boon gives Bobby a withering roll of his eyes, as if to say he expected better of him, and Bobby uses his middle finger to scratch the bridge of his nose.

He and Vincent stand in the hall and watch the two Southie kids walk out with two lawyers they couldn’t afford if they hit the number every day for a month straight, and Bobby knows that if they want to close this case now, it just got a hell of a lot fucking harder.

After he punches out, Bobby can feel the eels creeping into his blood, starting to itch. In the past, the primary way to scratch that itch was the needle, the spoon, and the brown powder. Now he recognizes it as a sign that it’s been too long since he went to a meeting.

He finds one in a church basement in Roxbury. He walks down the steps into the basement room that smells the way all Narcotics Anonymous meeting rooms smell — of coffee and cigarette smoke and donuts.

He takes a seat in the circle. Sparse attendance tonight — eleven bodies for thirty chairs — and no one’s too chatty. A white businessman with a briefcase looks really pissed off; a Puerto Rican woman dressed like a maid seems embarrassed. There’s a chunky black guy wearing construction boots caked with the same plaster dust that salts his hair. A woman who looks like a grade school teacher, a middle-aged guy with the sad eyes of a dog in the pound, a twenty-year-old who’s probably court-ordered and looks like he could be high right now. Three of them Bobby’s crossed paths with at other meetings for sure — the black Pan Am stewardess, the Polish truck driver, the birdlike woman who lost one of her kids in a fire. But no one’s in a sharing mood tonight. Finally, the guy running the group, Doug R., looks to Bobby and says, “How about you, friend? Care to share?”

It’s been months since Bobby shared at a meeting. He’s been warned by his sponsor, Mel, a retired cop, that this is another sign a slip could be coming. Walling oneself off into one’s own bullshit is its own form of dishonesty.

After a few dry coughs and a few false starts, he manages to get out a couple of sentences. “I had this dream the other night. My mother and a friend of mine from the marines were looking for me on a street in Hué.”

“In Way?” asks a woman with frizzy blond hair and sharp green eyes. She’s the one Bobby guessed might be a teacher.

“Hué. It’s a city in Vietnam. I was stationed around there for a while. So, yeah, my mother, who died when I was a kid, and my buddy Carl Johansen, who died when I was over there, they’re walking up this street looking for me. And I can see them because I’m in this, like, empty storefront with windows that stretch the entire block. And I’m running right alongside them yelling, ‘Hey, it’s me! It’s me!’ But they can’t hear me. I start banging on the windows and they still can’t hear me. Then I reach the end of the building. And I can’t get out. My mother and Carl just keep walking and calling my name until I can’t see them anymore. And then, after a while, I can’t hear them anymore. So, so I turn around in this empty store, and there’s a table with my lighter and my spoon and my powder on it. The syringe is brass-plated. Really comfy-looking chair for me to sit in. So I do. And I, ya know, get my works in order and shoot up. I won’t lie — it felt fucking great.”

People shift in their chairs. He can feel Doug R. watching him carefully, wondering if he made a mistake asking Bobby to share.