Small Mercies

Pete winks. “Says his name is Special.”

“What?”

“Special Agent Stansfield.”

Pete thinks he’s hilarious. That’s why he’s on his third wife and he’s only thirty-two.

Bobby points at his desk as he passes through the gate. “You can put him through.”

“Fills me with a deep pleasure, Bobby. Tickles my warm parts. You know that.”

Bobby gets to his desk and the phone is ringing, the button for line two blinking. He presses it and puts the phone to his ear. “Giles?”

“Bobby. How’s tricks?”

“Oh, you know. You?”

“You hear the busing protesters busted up one of the windows to our building?”

“I did.”

“They were chanting ‘Niggers suck’ for over half an hour, Bobby.” There’s a tone in his voice that suggests somehow Bobby either a) is responsible or b) can explain the behavior. “I mean, half an hour.”

“That’s a long time for one chant,” Bobby says. “You’d think they would have mixed it up.”

“Should be kept in cages, people like that.”

Giles Stansfield grew up in Connecticut. Went to Brown, then Yale Law. Until he joined the Bureau, he probably never met a black person who didn’t work a service job for the Stansfields or for Yale. Same went for poor whites.

“What’s up, Giles?”

“I hear you’re sniffing around the Butler crew.” His voice is suddenly convivial, as if they’re chatting over a bowl of punch at a garden party.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“I’m just thinking you might want to communicate with us, so no signals get crossed.”

“What signals could get crossed?”

“Just, well, signals.” Giles’s voice is still convivial but also a bit fretful, like the conversation is playing out differently than it had played out in his head.

“Why don’t you tell me what those signals could be, and I’ll know whether I could cross them with my own?”

He can hear Giles trying not to sigh. “I blame Nixon.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Bobby puts his service revolver in his desk drawer, adds his car keys for good measure.

“He created that Drug Enforcement Administration horseshit. Took the Bureau of Narcotics and folded them in with the ODEA. Then they grabbed a bunch of cowboys and rejects from precincts all over the Northeast, and now they call it an agency.”

“I thought they called it an administration.” Bobby doesn’t know why he loves to fuck with Bureau guys so much, but he does.

“Whatever they call it, those little worms with guns, those little gerbils with badges, they’re up on the Butlers too, apparently, which we didn’t know until they busted one of his guys.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He was our guy. Been working one of Marty’s chop shops for six months, and DEA went and cocked the whole thing up.”

“That’s too bad.” Bobby pats his pockets for his cigarettes, gets a bolt of panic when he realizes they’re not there. He looks around wildly, spies them right there on his desk, where he laid them about thirty seconds ago.

Across the bullpen, Vincent sticks his head out of Interview Room B and bulges his eyes at Bobby with a clear Get in here message. He scowls and closes the door again.

“Yeah, it is too bad,” Giles is saying. “Duplication of effort doesn’t help anyone. The solution is to just pick one team to run point.”

Bobby scoops up his cigarettes and matches. “Great idea,” he says, grinning from ear to ear. “We’ll take it.”

“Oh, no,” Giles says quickly, “you guys got enough on your plate. Why don’t you let us run point?”

“Why don’t we schedule a meeting over it?”

“Sure, but until then we could just have a handshake deal that—”

“I’ll have my girl reach out to your girl. We’ll get a meeting on the books.”

“Okay, but Bobby—”

“Gotta go, Giles.” Bobby hangs up.

My girl reach out to your girl. Where does he come up with this shit?

In Interview Room B, Ronald “Rum” Collins is sitting on the far side of the table looking like someone used his face for golf practice. Some of the damage is older, and Bobby recalls that Mary Pat got to the kid in a bar about a week ago. The new damage consists of a torn right eyebrow, a swollen left ear, a black, bulbous right eye socket (on top of the older yellowed bruising from a week ago), teeth blackened with blood, and cuts to his neck that look like they came from a razor blade or the flick of an extremely sharp knife.

But as Vincent warned Bobby, the worst of him is just below the waist. He smells like piss and even some shit, and his jeans are stuck to him with blood.

“What’s up, Rum?” Bobby sits across from him, trying not to smile at the absurdity of the sentence he’s just uttered. Why is everything so funny tonight? Then it hits him: Because — for the moment, anyway — I’ve got someone in my life. Makes everything a little brighter.

And the next thought: Christ, let this one last.

Rum is biting the inside of his lip like it’s his job. Bobby doesn’t even want to think what it looks like in there. “She’s gonna kill me.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say.”