Small Mercies

Though the OPEC oil embargo officially ended five months earlier, a major side effect of the gas shortages of ’73 is that no one drives around with a tank that’s any less than half full. You never know when the Arabs are going to hold the oil hostage again, and no one wants to get stuck sitting for hours on end in those fucking lines.

So the cars parked out front of the Fields of Athenry that night are all sitting on gas tanks at least two thirds full. Most, including Marty Butler’s AMC Matador, are topped up all the way. When someone tears a man’s shirt — what arson investigators will later determine was the dress uniform of a U.S. Army corporal — into strips, ties the bottom of each strip to a small stone, and drops those strips into the gas tanks of every car parked in front of the Fields, it would take only a match, a firm hand, and balls the size of fucking ostrich eggs to light one hell of a fire.

Which is what happens.

The men in the bar notice the light playing off the windows. It almost seems like Christmas lights, maybe strung in a garland between two streetlamps and lifting in the winter breeze. But it’s not winter, and those aren’t Christmas lights. By the time they all get out to the sidewalk, it’s like the end of the world or some fucking thing. Six cars in a row — half a block of them — are bonfires. Smoke and heat roil off the shells in oily waves.

They pull the hoses out from behind the bar and grab every fire extinguisher they can lay their hands on to keep the flames from hitting the bar itself, but the heat is like the heat of hell, and when the car windows start to blow out, guys get blasted with pebbles of glass. Poor Weeds catches a bunch of it in his right ear, enough to turn it into ground pork, as if his face weren’t already bad enough, and they drag him back into the bar and someone goes looking for tweezers.

By the time the firemen show up, sparks drizzle off the roof and fat blue flames dance along the exterior walls of the bar. Everyone’s evacuated. So they’re standing there on the street — Marty and Frankie and Brian Shea and about fifteen other guys in the most feared crew on the south side of the city — and they’re all sooty and bewildered, and the firemen push them back like they’re regular citizens, everyday fucking schmoes.

It’s Brian Shea who looks beyond the roof of the bar to the top of the building behind it and says, “Oh my God.”

The firemen see it too, and they start shouting and pointing and calling for backup.

They’d all thought the bar was on fire, but the bar has just a couple of sparks and flames to deal with, flames that are already dying under the weight of the water smashing into them. But the house behind the bar — the house where Marty has done his deals and run his girls and his casino nights for wiseguys all across New England — that’s got towers of flame shooting twelve feet high off the top of it.

They try to get to it, but the firemen push them back. Now the police are there and EMTs and, fuck, even reporters from 4, 5, and 7 and the Globe, the Herald, the Argus, and the Patriot Ledger.

Marty watches it all burn and says to Frankie, “If this is who I think it is, it falls on you, Tombstone. All on you.”

Bobby finds a message taped to his desk lamp the next morning:

To: Det. Sgt. M. Coyne

Fr: Some Southie Broad

Message: Sorry I burned the toast. She never got to Florida. She never left the cellar.

Bobby can tell from the handwriting that Cora Sterns took the message. He finds her coming out of the women’s locker room in street clothes. She doesn’t want to stand around work one second longer than she has to, so Bobby has to hotfoot beside her toward the parking lot.

“When did the call come in?”

“Three in the morning.”

“She called herself ‘Southie Broad’?”

“Called herself ‘Some Southie Broad.’”

“And she said she burned the toast?”

Cora pushes out through the door into the parking lot. “She insisted I put that in the message. I was like, ‘Lady, you fucking up the detective’s breakfast sounds like personal business you don’t call in on a department line.’ But she made me write it down.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t give your chippies your work number, Detective, let your sisters deal with them.”

“Yes, Cora.”

She shoots him a kinda friendly/kinda not middle finger as she walks to her car.

Twenty minutes later, Bobby hears about the fire in Southie last night, and the penny drops.

The arson investigators, tracing the point of origin, determined that the blaze started in the basement. They hand Bobby an oxygen mask and tank, tell him the basement flooring was recently done over with cement that’s still settling, so the fumes are toxic. They lead him down a blackened set of stairs and shine a light on a dark brown oval in the center of the floor. The rest of the floor is a goopy blue-gray. There’s a film of it over the brown oval, but it’s thin.