Small Mercies

“You don’t have to apologize for that. He’s angry. He didn’t know what he was saying.”

Dreamy’s eyes narrow at her. “I’m not apologizing for Reginald. I stopped him from hurting you so my girls could have their father at home, not in some shithole prison.”

Mary Pat can’t help think, Dreamy cusses too?

“I was expressing my regret for your loss,” Dreamy says. “However I feel about your daughter or about you, Mrs. Fennessy, I don’t think any mother deserves to lose a child, never mind two.”

“And I’m sorry for your loss,” Mary Pat manages.

“Don’t.” Dreamy holds up a hand. “Do not speak of my son. He’s dead because of you.”

Whoa, Mary Pat thinks. Hold on one fucking second there.

“I didn’t kill your son,” she says.

“No?” Dreamy says. “You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity and, and, and you can go fuck yourself, Mary Pat, if you think for one second I’m okay with that. Or that I forgive. I do not forgive. So go back to your neighborhood and sit with your monster friends and get yourselves all worked up to stop us from attending your precious school or whatever. But bitch, we’re coming whether you like it or not. And we’re going to keep coming until you quit, not the other way around. Until then, get the fuck out of my neighborhood.”

And that’s it. She’s gone. Mary Pat stands by the mailbox and is mortified to realize she’s crying — hot actual tears stream down her face — as she watches Calliope Williamson walk back up the block and disappear into her neat, well-tended home.

27

The headquarters for the Global Liberian Liberation Front sit inside a former synagogue on Dudley Street in a section of Roxbury that looks like the ash heap of the Urban American Dream. The three leaders of the GLLF sport horn-rimmed glasses and tower-of-power Afros, black turtlenecks and checked pants, matching Vandykes and airs of intellectual pretension, but Bobby knows all their reading matter was encountered first in a prison library. Whether the GLLF ventured into drug dealing as a means to finance a “higher end,” or the “higher end” was conceived as a cover for the drug dealing, is irrelevant. They’re fucking drug dealers, first and foremost.

The guys and girls who work under the main leadership are representative of the truth of the organization and rumored to be the ones who gave them the more authentic gang-sounding nickname, the Moorlocks. They’re kids, mostly, who don’t go in for turtlenecks or Vandykes or horn-rimmed glasses. They wear black leather car coats and wide-brimmed hats and shoes with three-inch heels. They deal drugs all over Roxbury, Mattapan, and Jamaica Plain, and they fuck up anyone who gets in their way. They’re cowboys (and cowgirls) who don’t give a shit. This recklessness makes them dangerous but, conversely, predictable if anyone decides to take a real run at them.

Vincent, who watches way too many movies and reads Guns & Ammo the way other guys read Hustler, wants to stage a pseudo-paramilitary raid on the GLLF building. Just go in there blasting and call it a plan. Several of the major weapons companies have been sending urban police departments amped-up military-grade weapons for years. New law enforcement philosophies coming out of L.A. and New York have begun to advocate for special teams of combat-ready police cells. In L.A., the first of these has been given a name, SWAT, and they took on the Black Panthers and the SLA in sustained firefights that armchair John Waynes love to believe put the order back in law and order. In reality, Bobby knows, those gunfights led to limited results, a shitload of property damage, and a new micro-generation of substandard cops who think they can compensate for bad instincts, poor people skills, and limited intelligence with high-powered weaponry.

One day, Bobby knows, the Vincents of the department will get a chance to prove their theories correct or not. Whether they’re proved right or wrong, the genie will be out of the bottle, and it will be probably hard, if not impossible, to put it back in. Until that day, though, Bobby outranks Vincent. He comes up with a plan for Operation Moorlock that involves a team in Narcotics while an ad hoc group of detectives from across Division handles surveillance on GLLF headquarters to make sure no one goes unaccounted for until Operation Moorlock has its shit locked down tight.