Small Mercies

Larry and Weeds stop shooting, but her ears continue to ring.

Marty calls to her again. “Do you know what you just received there, hon?”

She can’t speak. She can’t breathe. All her insides have seized up, like a large, cold hand is squeezing her heart as hard as it can.

“That was a 7.62-millimeter steel-jacketed bullet traveling twelve hundred miles an hour, Mary Pat. Once the shock and the adrenaline wear off, which should be any moment, your body will start to react to the damage. I suspect breathing will become difficult. Your blood will grow cold. It’ll be hard to speak. Or think. But I want you to lie there and try. I want you to think about all your mistakes — first and foremost of which was an utter lack of respect for my generosity and my friendship. I want you to ruminate on that,” Marty says, “because I am not going to finish you off. I’m going to sit here and enjoy a cigarette and the night air until you bleed out, you traitorous fucking cow.”

The back of Mary Pat’s throat suddenly fills with hot phlegm. She coughs it up only to realize it’s not phlegm at all. It’s blood.

Well, shit.

She’s known from the moment Marty handed her the bag of money that she would not stop until everyone involved in her daughter’s death answered for their sins. She never got to Marty himself, and that’s too bad, but it’s hard to get to the king. It’s always been hard to get to a king.

But man, did she fuck up the king’s court.

And now he’s telling her to lie here. To bleed out. To wait for the rats.

Be nice to see Dukie again (even if she’ll yearn for Ken Fen all the while). Maybe they can have a few beers and remember how much fun they used to have in the early days of their marriage.

“Hey, Marty,” she calls, alarmed by how feeble she sounds.

“Yes, hon?”

She gets to her feet and the room spins and she falls sideways into a wall. “How did you come under the impression...?” She steadies herself. Her lungs feel as if someone’s dipped them in glue.

And Noel. Won’t it be swell to see her Noel?

“What’s that?”

“Under the impression,” she repeats, “that I would ever take orders...”

She sticks tight to the wall on her left. Steps over Brian Shea and his missing face.

“I can’t hear you,” he calls.

“That I would ever take orders from a gutless... nothing like you?”

Coming home, Jules. Coming home, my baby girl.

She steps through the doorway into the half-moonlight and raises the gun. Actually gets a round off, maybe even two, before they return fire.

32

Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools takes effect on Thursday morning, September 12, 1974. The buses that transport black students to South Boston High School are accompanied by police escorts. The police wear riot gear. As the buses near the school, several hundred white protesters — adults and children — line the streets. Chants of “Niggers go home” give way to “Niggers suck” and “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Several protesters hold up pictures of monkeys. One brandishes a noose.

The bricks come from a construction site on West Broadway. Other people use rocks. But the bricks make the most noise and do the most damage when they hit the windows of the buses. The children on the buses discover the safest place during the pelting is under the seats, and the only reported injury is to a teenager who gets glass in her eye; she requires medical attention but doesn’t lose the eye.

Inside South Boston High, the black students are met with something they’ve known forever at their own schools but didn’t expect here — no white kids.

On the first day of school, not a single white student attends South Boston High School.

When word of this fact spreads through the demonstrators, their chant turns to “Vic-tor-y. Vic-tor-y.”

A few hours before, at four in the morning, Mary Pat Fennessy’s body is removed from the parade grounds of Fort Independence on Castle Island and transported to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Bobby, Vincent, and their hastily put-together squad of detectives and patrolmen arrive at Fort Independence about five minutes after Mary Pat’s death to find Marty Butler and his men gathering their spent shells and preparing to leave. They don’t put up any fight. The guns they used are legally registered. Mary Pat Fennessy fired at them after murdering Frank Toomey. Brian Shea was killed in what Marty calls “friendly fire.”