Small Mercies

Back in Southie, George leads them down the dark, empty blocks of cab companies and trucking depots. It’s past one now, and Mary Pat kills her lights so George won’t notice her behind him. There’s no one down here, it seems, just the two of them bumping along old cobblestone streets in the dark. Few functioning streetlights, one bar that caters to Teamsters and closes at eleven. Mary Pat slows to a crawl. Even with her headlights off, if he rolls down his window, George will probably be able to hear her lurching along the cobblestones behind him. She hangs back a full two blocks and does her best to avoid potholes.

He pulls into a parking lot in front of a low-slung stretch of one-car garages. Gets out. Unlocks the third garage from the right and pulls up the door. He fishes in his pockets before entering the garage and walking to the back of a Chevy Nova. He opens the trunk. Comes back out, grabs the duffel bag from the Impala trunk. Without the rifles, it’s much lighter than it was when he and Brian Shea lugged it across Bayside Road, but it’s still heavy enough that his right shoulder dips a bit and his head tilts along with it as he carries the bag to the Nova and deposits it in the trunk.

He closes the trunk, locks it. Closes the garage door. Locks that too. Gets in the Impala.

And off they go again.

It’s a short trip. George parks the Impala on East Second, up the street from his mother’s official house. Mary Pat watches him cut between two houses and then, she presumes, he hops fences through backyards until he reaches his mother’s house and slips in through the back. This suspicion is confirmed a few minutes later when a light goes on in the corner room of the second floor of Lorraine Dunbar’s house.

Half an hour later, the light goes out. Mary Pat stays where she is for another ten minutes in case he’s coming back out, but he doesn’t. He’s gone to bed, she’s pretty sure. It’s two in the morning. Anyone with common sense is asleep by now.

She drives Bess up East Second and heads back to that garage.

The parking lot and surrounding streets are as dark and quiet as when she left them, so she parks in the lot on the assumption that anyone else who rolls up here at this time of night won’t be up to any good either, so she may as well keep Bess close in case she needs to make a quick getaway.

The padlock George attached to the garage door is as basic as they come, but it’s nevertheless resistant to Dukie’s picks. Or to her use of them, at least. This is a shame — she was just starting to get cocky about her ability to pick a lock; was, in her mind, giving Dukie posthumous shit for his common refrain that there was a “skill” to picking a lock that the average person didn’t appreciate. After her fourth unsuccessful try, she gives up and goes with the bolt cutters.

As the bottom of the lock clatters to the ground and the top of it sits clamped in the blades of the bolt cutters, she thinks, Fuck skill.

But then changes her mind again when she picks the lock of the Nova’s trunk on the first try.

“I still got it, Dukie,” she tells him as she opens the trunk and shines her flashlight in.

The bag is unzipped and she can see right into it, but what she sees there doesn’t compute. It should — what else had she thought could be in there? — but still it doesn’t. There was a code in Southie. There were things you didn’t do:

You didn’t rat.

You never turned your back on a family member (even if you hated him).

You never told anyone outside the neighborhood what was going on inside the neighborhood.

And...

You never sold drugs.

Never.

Not ever.

The bag was filled with drugs. Kilos of brown powder, kilos of white powder, bricks of pot, plastic tubs filled with pills.

These aren’t George Dunbar’s drugs. They’ve been given to him. Entrusted to him. By Brian Shea.

These are Marty Butler’s drugs.

All these years, everyone has wondered why Marty and his crew can’t keep the drugs out of Southie.

And now she knows the answer — because they’re the ones bringing the drugs in.

They’ve been killing their own.

They’ve been enslaving a whole generation of kids — to the pills, to the mirror and the rolled-up bill, to the needle and the spoon.

Drugs didn’t kill Noel.

The Butler crew killed Noel. Just like they killed his father. Just like they killed his sister.

The Butler crew killed Mary Pat’s family.

She leans against the wall at the back of the garage and considers that. For some reason, instead of tears or rage, all that exits her mouth is a dry chuckle.

She can see Marty Butler’s bland catalog-model face floating in front of her own.

“You killed my family,” she whispers in the silence of the garage.

He smiles back at her.

“I’m going to kill yours,” she promises him.

George Dunbar arrives at the garage at eight a.m. He notices the missing lock first thing. He stares at the space where it was.