Page 30 of The Murder Inn
Shauna didn’t answer.
“No returns on sale items,” the woman chirped. Shauna waited until the attendant had walked back to collect more washed items before she zipped up the front of the jacket, opened the door to the store, and walked out into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
NICK PARKED BY a playground outlined in blue moonlight and walked up the hill toward the lookout. All of Gloucester sprawled below him—the shipping yards and marinas reaching like gold fingers into the black sea to his left, and to his right a handful of scattered lights, houses, properties, sinking and disappearing as they were consumed by the distant woods. Breecher was sitting on the bumper of her rental car, watching red lights blink out on the sea. Nick went and sat beside her, and in the silence he remembered those long nights in the desert, when the two of them could go three or four hours without speaking, as they watched for planes overhead, or movement on the hills. There were no hellos or goodbyes. The four-man unit had functioned as a singular organism, sometimes stretched across the base, or across a slab of land, but always connected. Since the killings, he had felt Breecher, Master, and Dorrich’s presence across the states and towns that stretched betweenthem. Breecher had been the farthest away, in Chicago, the others closer in. All of them united, a circle of trust. What had happened linked them in a way that would never be severed. So it seemed ridiculous to greet Breecher. They were never really apart.
“Is Bill gonna tell someone?” she asked eventually.
“I don’t think so,” Nick said. He breathed warm mist onto the cold night air. “If he does, it won’t come suddenly. He’ll tell me first, and I’ll tell you.”
“Did he say anything this afternoon?” she asked. “After you got back?”
“He texted.” Nick took his phone out of his pocket. “I tried to avoid him. But he’s right onto it, as I knew he would be. He wants us to track down Master. He says he’s gonna find out what happened with Dorrich. Whether there was a crime scene or whatever.”
They watched the sea, the blinking lights.
“I can’t believe we told someone outside the team,” Breecher said. “It feels like… I don’t know. Now that I’ve heard it told to another person, a regular person—”
“It’s like it wasn’t real.”
“Yeah,” she said. Nick could feel her eyes on him. “Have you ever told anyone else?”
“No,” he said.
“What about your therapist?”
“No.”
“Did you ever say anything to your shrink that they might, you know, be able to piece together—”
“Breecher,” Nick said. “You’re panicking. We can’t panic right now.”
“Hell yeah, I’m panicking,” Breecher said. “Because if this hits the newspapers, the story won’t come out the way it did in that diner today. We won’t look like we were duped, you and me. We’ll look like monsters. And when they find out the rest of it, the stuff we didn’t say today, it’ll be even worse.”
“Hmm.” Nick nodded.
Breecher rubbed her eyes hard with her palms, like she was trying to smudge out the memories. “Your friend Bill only really knows half of the story. But when he learns the whole truth—”
“I know,” Nick said. “He’ll turn on us.”
The two veterans fell quiet. The cooling engine beneath the hood where they sat was quietly ticking, a sensation Nick could feel rather than hear over the breeze.
“We have to make sure he doesn’t find out,” Nick said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
NONE OF THIS Bulger thing made sense, and that worried Norman Driver. He stood in his kitchen, setting out the objects he needed to prepare his dinner, relishing the simplicity and orderliness of the task. Cutting board. Knife. Potatoes. Steak. His phone was propped against the edge of the window that looked out onto the lush driveway lined with sunset-lit trees. On the phone’s screen, he watched two of his men, Chiat and Fuller, live-streaming themselves to him as they drove along a highway toward the Canadian border.
Driver toyed with the idea that Pooney had been telling the truth. That he and Marris had broken into Mark Bulger’s house, beaten up the widow, and that she’d turned around and blown Marris’s head off with a 12 gauge. Pooney said he’d hightailed it through a bathroom window after the lady was distracted by a knock at the front door. It all seemed credible. Crazy butcredible. There were enough fine details—the bathroom window, the type of shotgun used—for Driver to believe Poon. But he’d checked the story out and there had been no calls to police that night, no bodies discovered in or around Needham. Two of his guys had checked out the house and found no crime scene. The woman had indeed been home. She’d even invited a couple of young neighbors inside, and after an hour or so all three had left, apparently calm and cheerful. When Driver’s guys had gone in later, they’d discovered a safe hidden in the floor of the garden shed. It was unlocked, and empty.
So where was Marris? Where was Mark Bulger’s wife? Where was his collection of incriminating evidence?
If Driver could find the evidence, he could relieve himself of a decades-old knot of worry in the back of his mind that one of these days, as Bulger had always threatened, the truth about what Driver had done to Georgette Winter-Lee would rise to the surface. That the glove he’d left behind in her apartment would find its way into a forensic lab somewhere, and Driver’s life would be over.
Driver set aside the potatoes he’d sliced. He checked his phone. Chiat and Fuller were pulling up to the border. Driver heard the truck’s breaks squeal. Chiat’s face, pitted with acne scars, was cast icy white in the beam of the border officer’s flashlight as Fuller rolled down the window. Driver listened while he rubbed spices into his steak.
“Evening, gentlemen.”