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The men who’d robbed the Harbor Trust branch on Seaport Boulevard had been wearing masks and had gotten away with over eight-hundred-thousand dollars. It wasn’t the money that bothered her — banks were insured against robbery — it was that a guard had been shot in a gunfight with the perpetrators. That and the fact that a gunfight meant the possibility of others being injured, namely Will. Nolan hadn’t heard from him since the night before the robbery. Neither had Bridget.
The only upside to the call she’d gotten from Seamus demanding her immediate presence at the Cat was the possibility that she would see Will and finally know he was okay.
She hadn’t called Nolan to tell him she was on her way to the bar, both because of their agreement to stay off their phones and because she didn’t want him to worry, or worse yet, argue that she shouldn’t go. The situation was volatile enough as it was.
She pulled into the Cat’s parking lot and stepped out of her car. She’d already run down all the possible reasons Seamus wanted to see her: he knew she’d been collaborating with Nolan and Will, he was going to call in her debt to teach her a lesson, he was going to put a bullet in her head then and there to make a point that no one was above retribution if they were rats.
Running would only make things worse. In the event that she was wrong, Seamus would come for her, assuming her guilt. And he wouldn’t stop until she was at the bottom of the harbor.
It was okay. Whatever happened, it would be okay. Nolan would make sure Owen and her parents were taken care, and she’d be dead and unable to object.
She was rounding the corner of the building when a cop almost barreled into her turning the same corner. She stepped back and three more uniformed officers followed, their faces grim.
That was when she heard the shouting.
“You mother-fecking maggots are going to regret this! I’ll have every one of your badges when this is all over. Every fecking one!” Seamus screamed.
She was so shocked by the display playing out in front of her that she could only stand and stare as two officers hauled Seamus out of the Cat to a black and white by the curb, its lights spinning red and blue, three more cars cordoning off the street in front of the bar.
There were more uniforms than she could count, not to mention several people wearing black windbreakers, FBI spelled out in white on the back, all of them coming and going, carrying boxes out of the Cat to the waiting squad cars.
Seamus caught sight of her, his eyes bulging. “Monaghan!” he barked. “Get your ass to the station and get ready to bail me out. These feckers don’t have shite on me!” He glared at them. “You hear that motherfeckers? You don’t have shite! I’ll be back here having a cold one by tonight.”
They stuffed him into one of the squad cars with expressions that varied from boredom to fear, and Bridget stepped back to let one of the Feds pass with a box in his hands.
“You his lawyer?” one of the cops asked her.
“I don’t… I don’t know.” Seamus was in the car with the windows rolled up, probably unable to hear over the police activity.
“He’s going to D4 for processing,” the cop said.
She nodded and backed away, tearing her eyes from the scene to walk to her car.
A cool voice in her head, her lawyer voice, was telling her this was all wrong. She should go inside the Cat, see if any of Seamus’s men were there to tell her what had happened, what the cops and Feds had been doing and whether they’d violated protocols, things Seamus could use later to fight any charges against him. She should approach the car where Seamus was still sitting by the curb, tell him not to say a word until she got him out.
But her mind was spinning, running though her own culpability and the fact that Will was nowhere to be seen. It was all she could do to get to the car and shut the door.
She leaned her head against the steering wheel and forced herself to take deep breaths. Then she did the thing she’d wanted to do but hadn’t done in the weeks since Nolan had reappeared in her life, since he’d turned up at the Cat.
She called him.
26
Nolan sat at the table in the back room of the Cat. It had been four days since Seamus’s arrest and release on bail, three since Will had finally contacted him to say he was alive and well.
The robbery hadn’t gone as planned. Seamus’s strategy — to hit another branch of Harbor Trust in case his plans had been compromised — had been sound. Corporate banks tended to follow the same procedures for storing their cash and dealing with robberies, allowing Seamus to make use of the information he’d gathered while casing the branch on Broadway.
But the strategy hadn’t accounted for the fact that the security guard at the Seaport branch was an off-duty cop with a history of bad conduct and something to prove. He’d tried to prove it by turning the bank into a firing range in spite of the customers on the floor, screaming in fear for their lives.
The guard had lived, but just barely, a fact that had done nothing to soothe the BPD’s bloodlust for Seamus.
The charges against Seamus probably wouldn’t stick — alleged plans to rob one bank didn’t make you guilty of robbing another, and no evidence of the robbery had been found at the Cat or in Seamus’s house, the only two places covered by the Feds’ search warrant. The laptop hadn’t been located either, probably a product of Seamus’s paranoia after his informants at BPD were compromised. Nolan doubted the DA would bring the case to trial without new evidence, a legal assessment Bridget shared.
It was hard not to feel like they were back where they started, but Christophe had assured him the Feds were still working on the data Nolan had gotten off Seamus’s computer. They wouldn’t hesitate to bring federal charges against Seamus if they had even a shot in hell of making them stick — the division between local cops and Feds tended to disappear when one of them was injured or killed — but it was anybody’s guess how long that would take. In the meantime, Bridget was still between a rock and a hard place, Will and Nolan tiptoeing around Seamus, who was more volatile and paranoid than ever.
Nolan heard Mick talking to someone on the other side of the curtain. It parted and Bridget walked in and headed for Seamus’s table.
Nolan would have been proud if he hadn’t been so fucking scared for her. She’d been a mess when she’d called him after Seamus’s arrest and he’d immediately met her in Brookline to walk her through their next steps. She’d left him an hour later, gone to D4, and posted bail for Seamus exactly as he’d ordered.
