Just as they were about to hoist him in, they dropped him. He fell to his knees on the cobblestones and he heard Albert yell, “Go! Go! Go!” and their footsteps on the cobblestones. Maybe they’d already shot him in the back of the head because the heavens descended in bars of light.
His face was saturated in white, and the buildings along the alley erupted in blue and red, and tires squealed and somebody shouted something through a megaphone and someone fired a gun and then another gun.
A man walked through the white light toward Joe, a trim and confident man, a man who wore command like a birthmark.
His father.
More men walked out of the white behind him, and Joe was soon surrounded by a dozen members of the Boston Police Department.
His father cocked his head. “So you’re a cop killer now, Joseph.”
Joe said, “I didn’t kill anybody.”
His father ignored that. “Looks like your accomplices were about to take you on the dead man’s drive. Did they decide you were too much of a liability?”
Several of the policemen had removed their billy clubs.
“Emma’s in the back of a car. They’re going to kill her.”
“Who?”
“Albert White, Brendan Loomis, Julian Bones, and some guy named Donnie.”
On the streets beyond the alley, several women screamed. A car horn blared, followed by the solid thump of a crash. More screams. In the alley, the rain turned from a drizzle to a heavy downpour.
His father looked at his men, then back at Joe. “Fine company you keep, son. Any other fairy tales you have for me?”
“It’s not a fairy tale.” Joe spit blood from his mouth. “They’re going to kill her, Dad.”
“Well, we won’t kill you, Joseph. In fact, I won’t touch you a’tall. But some of my coworkers would like a word.”
Thomas Coughlin leaned forward, hands on his knees, and stared at his son.
Somewhere behind that gaze of iron lived a man who’d slept on the floor of Joe’s hospital room for three days when Joe had the fever back in 1911, who’d read each of the city’s eight newspapers to him, cover to cover, who told him he loved him, who told him if God wanted his son, He’d have to go through him, Thomas Xavier Coughlin, and God would know, sure, what a rough proposition that could turn out to be.
“Dad, listen to me. She’s—”
His father spit in his face.
“He’s all yours,” he said to his men and walked away.
“Find the car!” Joe screamed. “Find Donnie! She’s in a car with Donnie!”
The first blow—a fist—connected with Joe’s jaw. The second, a shot from a billy club, he was pretty sure, hit his temple. After that, all light disappeared from the night.
CHAPTER SIX
All the Sinners Saints
The ambulance driver gave Thomas his first hint of the publicity nightmare about to descend on the BPD.
As they strapped Joe to a wooden gurney and lifted him into the back of the ambulance, the driver said, “You throw this kid off the roof?”
The rain came down in a clatter so loud they all had to shout.
Thomas’s aide and driver, Sergeant Michael Pooley, said, “His injuries were sustained before we arrived.”
“Yeah?” The ambulance driver looked from one to the other, water pouring from the black brim of his white cap. “Horseshit.”
Thomas could feel the temperature rising in the alley, even in the rain, so he pointed at his son on the gurney. “This man was involved in the murders of those three police officers in New Hampshire.”
Sergeant Pooley said, “Feel better now, asshole?”
The ambulance driver was checking Joe’s pulse, eyes on his wristwatch. “I read the papers. All I do most days—sit up in my cab and read the fucking papers. And this kid was the driver. And while they were chasing him, they shot another police car all to hell.” He placed Joe’s wrist on his chest. “He didn’t do it, though.”
Thomas looked at Joe’s face—torn black lips, flattened nose, eyes swelled shut, a collapsed cheekbone, black blood crusted in his eyes and ears and nose and the corners of his mouth. Blood of Thomas’s blood. His creation.
“But if he hadn’t robbed the bank,” Thomas said, “they wouldn’t be dead.”
“If the other cops hadn’t used a fucking machine gun, they wouldn’t be dead.” The driver closed the doors, looked at Pooley and Thomas, and Thomas was surprised by the revulsion in his eyes. “Your guys probably just beat this kid to death. But he’s the criminal?”
Two guard units pulled in behind the ambulance, and all three vehicles drove off into the night. Thomas had to keep reminding himself to think of the beaten man in the ambulance as “Joe.” Thinking of him as “son” was too overwhelming. His flesh and blood, and a lot of that blood and some of that flesh lay in this alley.
He said to Pooley, “You put that APB out on Albert White?”
Pooley nodded. “And Loomis and Bones and Donnie No Last Name, but we assume it’s Donnie Gishler, one of White’s guys.”
“Make Gishler a priority. Get it out to all units that he might have a woman in the car. Where’s Forman?”
Pooley chin-gestured. “Up the alley.”
Thomas started walking and Pooley fell in line. When they reached the crowd of policemen by the service door, Thomas avoided looking at the puddle of Joe’s blood near his right foot, a puddle rich enough to receive the rain and still remain a bright red. Instead, he focused on his chief of detectives, Steve Forman.
“You got anything on the cars?”
Forman flipped open his steno notebook. “Dishwasher said there was a Cole Roadster parked in the alley between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. After that, dishwasher said it was gone, said this Dodge replaced it.”
The Dodge was what they’d been trying to drag Joe into when Thomas and the cavalry had arrived.
“I want a priority APB on the Roadster,” Thomas said. “It’s being driven by Donald Gishler. There might be a woman in the backseat, Emma Gould. Steve, she’s of the Charlestown Goulds. Know who I mean?”
“Oh, yeah,” Forman said.
“Not Bobo’s kid. She’s Ollie Gould’s.”
“Okay.”
“Send someone to make sure she’s not safe and sound in bed on Union Street. Sergeant Pooley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Have you seen this Donnie Gishler in the flesh?”
Pooley nodded. “He’s about five-six, a hundred ninety pounds. Usually wears black knit caps. Had a handlebar mustache last time I saw him. The One-Six would have his mug shot.”
“Send someone to get it. And get out the description to all units.”
He looked at the puddle of his son’s blood. A tooth floated in it.
He and his eldest son, Aiden, hadn’t spoken in years, though he did receive the occasional letter filled with bland facts but no personal reflections. He didn’t know where he lived or even if he was alive or dead. His middle son, Connor, had been blinded during the police strike riots of ’19. Physically, he’d adapted to his infirmity with commendable speed, but mentally it had set ablaze his inclination toward self-pity, and he’d quickly turned to alcohol. After he’d failed to drink himself to death, he found religion. Shortly after he abandoned that flirtation (God apparently demanded more from his worshippers than a love affair with martyrdom), he took up residence at the Silas Abbotsford School for the Blind and Crippled. They gave him a custodian’s job—this, for a man who’d been the youngest assistant district attorney in state history assigned as lead prosecutor on a capital case—and he lived out his days there, mopping floors he couldn’t see. Every now and then he was offered a teaching job at the school, but he’d declined them all under the pretense of shyness. There was nothing shy about any of Thomas’s sons. Connor had simply decided to shutter himself away from all who loved him. Which, in his case, meant Thomas.