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“The nurses responding to the Code found your coffee spilled on the floor and you laying in a heap next to it. You must have tried to respond to the code, but you were running on empty. You spilled your coffee and slipped, hitting your head on the way down.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” I muttered, even though I was beginning to see what the scene must have looked like to an outsider. Especially since the attacker was nowhere to be found. “But what about Johnny’s blood panel?”
“It came back negative.” When I shook my head in denial, Jerome continued. “The patient had a pulmonary embolism. It’s something we try to prevent, but unfortunately, it sometimes happens after the kind of surgery he had. You know this.” Jerome’s voice had softened with something resembling pity, and I hated him for it.
“I’m worried about you,” he continued. “Not just as a mentor, but as a friend. The fact that you keep referring to the patient by name—never mind that you publicly tore his family new assholes—you’re too close to this. You’ve got a big heart, Cass, but you’ve got to leave that at the door in this job, along with whatever baggage you’re carrying. Emotions can’t enter into the equation, just this.” He tapped his temple.
I lurched to my feet. I still felt like throwing up, the room still spun, but I somehow managed to gather what shaky scraps of dignity still remained to me. “Jerome, I respect the hell out of you, but you’re wrong. I know what I saw. I am not going to let this go.”
He sighed. “Are you at least going to go home?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Try to get some rest.”
I let him walk me to the door. Jerome still had that look of concerned pity on his face, but it didn’t bother me as much as before. I had the bit between my teeth now.
I crumpled my fingers around the note in my pocket. Johnny’s last words.
My patient had been murdered, and I would bet my nonexistent bank account that Redhead and Murder-Glare—yes, they were back to those names, real names were too good for them—I would bet anything they knew who killed him. And I wasn’t about to let the hospital administration’s obviously skewed moral compass stand in my way.
If they didn’t want to believe me, then I would just have to find someone who would.
4
Connor
Gordie’slipsplitbeneathmy fist. “Who else knew about the drop?
“N-Nobody. I didn’t tell nobody, I swear—”
I hit him again. The chair Gordie was tied to rocked with the weight of my punch. I wasn’t the kind of man who relished violence, but damn if it didn’t feel good to hit something just then. Especially a slimy little weasel like Gordie Sullivan.
“I’m running out of patience,Gordon,” I said. “We already purged your cell, and we know you sold us out to Moretti.”
“That’s impossible! My phone—"
“—was scrubbed by an amateur. You forgot to empty your cache backlog.” Tommy leaned down and bopped Gordie’s shattered nose with his own cell phone. “Digital is forever, darling.”
The sound of Gordie’s panicked wheezing melted into the background as I turned and walked out the side door, the lapping waves and constant mechanical rumble from the nearby shipyard occasionally punctuated by the sound of flesh meeting flesh. Fine—let Tommy take a whack at him. I was getting too emotionally invested in things, and that wasn’t how I did business.
“The little prick crack, yet?” Alfie was leaning up against the Town Car’s quarter panel.
“Give him a minute. Tommy’s just getting warmed up.”
“Speaking of, I got a call in to Bootsie, he’ll be by in an hour.”
Bootsie was our Cleaner. He made sure the bodies stayed hidden. “Tell him to use O’Bannon’s boat this time, Everett is starting to get nosy.”
“Aye, aye.”
Some people persisted with the assumption that the Irish mob was nothing more than a disorganized bunch of thugs. The Italian Mafiosos with their tailored suits and Cheshire cat smiles and the hard-hitting Russian Bratva get all the credit, be we Irish? We never quite rose to the same level in most people’s eyes.
But here’s the thing—that’s the way we wanted it. We operated from the shadows, because shadows are a hard thing to grasp. You never appreciate the magnitude of the darkness until you’re surrounded by it, enemies coming at you from all sides and no light to show you just how big the monster is.
So yes, while we weren’t as showy as some and we didn’t have the hierarchy as the other facets of organized crime, wewere organized—and we did better than you’d think. We had the peoples’ respect. Anyone who thought otherwise was soon corrected to the tune of Mr. Louisville Slugger.
The McTiernan Clan operated out of South Boston, headquartered on the West Broadway Street that gave them the name. My uncle, Callum McTiernan, had been running us for the last three years, ever since Michael Quinn had stepped down for health reasons. Tommy and I were his Warlords. We were the head enforcers, in charge of the rank-and-file members called Buttonmen. We kept people in line. Not necessarily placing hits on people—things like that usually fell to Reapers like Teagan—but Tommy and I each had a group of guys working under us and a large swath of territory to manage, and every once in a while, things could get bloody.
