Small Mercies

Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. But now he realizes — truly grasps — he’s living in his own nightmare. Wide awake for every second of it.

He searches her eyes, and she allows him full access. Somewhere beyond the walls of the fort, a seabird cries out.

Frank Toomey’s face grows dark and cold with outrage. “No!” He jerks at the cuffs on his wrists. “You hear me, bitch? No! You will—”

She slams the heel of her hand into his forehead, rams the back of his head into the granite wall. “How is it,” she says as he tries to clear the tweeting birds from his fucking brain, “that you have any rage left in your soul for me? You took my child. You took my child, Frank. And the baby inside of her. You used her. Chewed up her life while she could have been living it and then plunged a knife up under her rib cage and into her heart? And you call yourself a human being?” She holds up the blade of his knife to his face. “Is this the knife?”

Frank stares at her with his dead eyes.

“Don’t give me your fucking eyes,” she says. “Like you’re too cool for my pain. This is my pain.” She slices his cheek.

“Jesus!”

“I said lower your fucking eyes.”

He glances at his own blood on the knife blade and then looks down at his lap.

“You’re only alive right now because I honestly want an answer — how can you raise children of your own? How can you know something of love and yet kill a child?”

“I’ve killed lots of people in my life, Mary Pat.”

“I know. But a child, Frank?”

He makes a shrugging motion, his hands cuffed against the wall. “I don’t think about it.” The blood drips off his cheek in fat drops. Plop. Plop. Plop.

“About what?”

“About any of it. Killing someone, it’s like shoveling snow — I don’t like doing it, but if it’s gotta be done, it gets done. And my kids have nothing to do with it. They’re my kids. A separate thing. Your daughter—”

“Say her name.”

“Jules,” he says. “She was a problem. She was talking shit about telling my wife she was pregnant, and she killed that kid so—”

“She didn’t kill him. She was with them when—”

He’s shaking his head. “She used the rock on him. It was her.”

She smashes her fist down on his shattered leg. The scream he lets out is like something from the animal kingdom, the screech of prey being eaten alive in the high grass. He topples to the dirt floor. Lies there with his mouth open, eyes wide with shock.

“She didn’t use the rock,” she says. “You’re just trying to make shit up. You weren’t even on the platform.”

“Why would I make that up?” he gasps. Tears fill his eyes when he says, “Please don’t hit my leg again, but why would I make that up? How’s it serve me? And of course I was on the platform.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She looks out at the parade grounds under the light of a half-moon.

“I think...” he manages as he works his way back into a sitting position, “I think she did it as a small mercy.”

She looks back at him. “What?”

“Possibly,” he says.

“Mercy from what?”

He doesn’t say anything for a bit.

“Mercy from what?”

“I told them to fry him.”

“Huh?”

“Throw him on the third rail,” he explains. “Fry him. Show the rest of the spooks in this city what happens if they come down to our part of town.” He looks at the blood slowly consuming his coat and the tape she’s wrapped around it. His skin is the blue-white of mackerel. “Jules didn’t like that. She kept saying let him go.” He snorts. “We couldn’t let him go. No. I told them, ‘Fuck that. Fry him.’ The boys, they listened — boys do that. They picked the kid up and were about to toss him between the second and third rail, and yeah, that’s when she hit him. Which ended any idea that it was a fucking accident, thank you very much. He was dead the second he hit the ground.”

She watches him steadily. Thinks it’s odd how the worst of us look no different than the best of us. Like someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s father. Loved. Capable of love. Human.

“And you couldn’t forgive her, could you?” she asks. “For the mercy?”

He hisses against the pain for a moment. “If she was weak there, where else would she be weak? In a police station? On the stand? I’m sorry, Mary Pat, but you know there’s a code down here. Live and die by it.”

She reaches into her bag, comes out with her .38, and is about to blow his fucking brains all over the granite behind him when she hears a vehicle approaching.

The car pulls right into the fort. Doors open. Headlights sweep the parade grounds.

Marty Butler calls, “Time for a reckoning, Mary Pat.”

30

Bobby’s let it be known throughout Division that he’d appreciate being notified should anything violent connected to the Butler crew occur in the next week or two.

It doesn’t take long.