Small Mercies

“It’s okay,” he says gently.

“It’s not!” she screams into the confines of the phone booth. “It’s not. My daughter’s dead and Auggie Williamson’s dead too because I sold my daughter lies. And before she ended up swallowing them? She knew it. They always know it. They know at five. But you keep repeating the lies until you wear them down. That’s the worst of it — you wear them down until you scoop all the good out of their hearts and replace it with poison.”

She has no idea how long she weeps. Only that at one point, she has to put another dime in the phone, and still she can’t stop crying.

Bobby stays on the line with her the whole time.

Once the sobs have become sniffles, she hears his voice through the earpiece: “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, I’d like you to take a day off.”

She can’t speak yet. Her throat is filled with saline and mucous.

“Mary Pat? Please. Take twenty-four hours. Don’t do anything. I’ll meet you wherever you want. No badge. Just a friend.”

“Why are you my friend?” she manages eventually.

“Because we’re both parents,” he says.

“I was. Not anymore.”

“No, you still are. You always will be. And all parents know failure. It’s the only thing we know for sure. So, yeah, your daughter, Jules, she had some failings that you passed on to her. Okay. But everyone I spoke to about her? They all talked about how kind she was. How funny. What a great friend she could be.”

“What’s your point?”

“You gave her those qualities too, Mary Pat. We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”

“I’m good at battle,” she says.

“That’s not the battle I’m talking about.”

“About the only thing I’m good at.”

“I bet there’s a lot more you’re good at.”

“Now you’re shining me on to keep me on the phone.”

“You called me.”

“So?”

“So I think you want me to talk you out of whatever you’re planning to do.”

She laughs, and he’s chastened to hear that it’s a dry laugh. “I don’t want you to talk me out of anything.”

“Then why call?”

“Because someday someone’s going to make sense of this.”

“What’s ‘this’?”

“What I’m about to do.”

“Don’t do it.”

“And I want you to tell them what I told you.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I told you, Detective Coyne, that you can’t take everything from someone. You have to leave them something. A crumb. A goldfish. Something to protect. Something to live for. Because if you don’t do that, what in God’s name do you have left to bargain with?”

Just as Bobby’s thinking he should have started a trace on this call five minutes ago, she hangs up.

He sits there, staring at the phone, and remembers why he started doing heroin in the first place — when you’re high on smack, the world seems gorgeous. When you aren’t, it seems like a hopeless fucking mess.

Mary Pat hangs up the phone and leans back in the booth and watches with a kind of stupefied awe as Frank Toomey drives right past her.

She follows him back to Southie, once again taking the gamble that she knows where he’s going, so she doesn’t have to tail him tightly.

And he rewards her when he pulls over in front of his home on West Ninth. The street is so still, you could hear someone blow their nose from a block over. When Frank opens the door of the Caddy, she can hear the hinges creak.

Bess is already rolling. Mary Pat has her foot off the gas and is just allowing the creaky bitch to move via her own momentum. She waits to hit the gas until Frank closes the door to the Caddy and bends to lock it with the key.

This is it, she thinks. This is the end. I run him the fuck over, slam it into reverse to finish the job if necessary, and drive away. I go as far as the money and luck will take me. Which, let’s be honest, won’t be far. And I die from police bullets or Butler crew bullets because I will not go to jail and I will not let those Butler vermin lay their hands on me.

But Frank turns to see the car coming at him and drops to the ground. He rolls under the Caddy and almost makes it — he almost does — but the tires crunch one of his legs. From underneath the Caddy, his scream is sharp.

She screeches to a halt and gets out of Bess.