“So he did,” Bushell answered, his voice just as quiet. Of itself, his right hand slid to the butt of his revolver. The fat man had his right hand jammed down in to the right outer pocket of his jacket. Bushell wouldn’t have liked that under any circumstances. After the gun battle at Buckley Bay, he liked it even less.
The fat man looked at him and Stanley and Kathleen, and at the carloads of RAMs behind them at the corner of Lansdowne and Ipswich. He turned his head, a quick, nervous gesture, and spotted the Boston constables down toward Boylston. Even at a distance of thirty or forty yards, Bushell saw him lick his lips: his tongue was very wet and pink.
“Sir, we’d like to talk with you,” Bushell said, taking another step or two toward him. “Do you know a man named Joseph Kilbride?”
“I don’t have to talk to you,” the fellow answered, his voice a foghorn bass. “I don’t have to do anything you tell me to, not one damn thing, do you hear me?”
“Careful, Chief,” Stanley muttered out of the side of his mouth. “He’s as ready to go as a handful of fulminate.”
“Don’t I know it,” Bushell whispered back. He raised his voice and spoke to the fat man again: “Take it easy, pal. Nobody’s going to - “
“I’m not your pal!” the fat man shouted. He looked back over his shoulder at the constables. They’d moved toward him while his attention was fixed on Bushell. He made as if to retreat back into the furniture shop.
“Hold it right there!” Bushell said sharply.
Instead of obeying, the man yanked his hand out of his pocket and hurled what looked like a large, dun-colored egg at Bushell. “Grenade!” Samuel Stanley shouted, yanking out his pistol and throwing himself flat at the same time.
Bushell used his forearm to knock Kathleen Flannery to the pavement. She screamed. He didn’t care. He dove down on top of her, shielding her with his body. As it had in the Queen Charlotte Islands, time seemed to stretch like taffy. He drew his own revolver, clenched left hand on right wrist as prescribed in the manual of arms, and aimed the weapon at the fat man.
Stanley fired. The grenade exploded. Instead of stretching, time suddenly crumpled in on itself, so that everything happened at once. Bushell squeezed the trigger. The revolver roared and bucked in his hand at the same instant as what felt like a couple of red-hot needles drilled into his right leg and Kathleen screamed again.
The fat man jerked as if stung. He performed an awkward pirouette, his arms flailing to help him keep his balance. Stanley fired again. So did Bushell, at almost the identical moment. One of those shots Bushell was never sure which - caught the fat man in the side of the head. He crashed to the pavement, surely dead before he hit it. Bright red in the summer sun, a pool of blood spread beneath him and poured over the kerb into the gutter.
Bushell’s ears rang. The stench of smokeless powder was thick in his nostrils. His heart pounded crazily. Kathleen Flannery writhed beneath him. All unbidden, his thoughts went back to the night before. How different that had been! He scrambled to his feet. “You all right?” he asked, including both her and Sam in the question.
“Yes, I’m fine,” Stanley said. “God in heaven, gunplay twice now - three times, if you count Tricky Dick.” He rose too and, revolver still in hand, walked toward the body of the fat man. Kathleen took stock of herself. The green dress was filthy and had a hole above one knee. Her elbow was scraped raw, and a fragment of grenade casing had scored a bleeding furrow along one arm. “I’m all right,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. “Thank you, Tom.” Then her eyes went to the corpse on the pavement. “Oh, God,” she whispered. She’d seen violent death twice now in a matter of weeks, twice more than the average civilian saw in a lifetime. Still whispering, she asked, “How are you, Tom?”
“I’ll find out.” Bushell’s trousers were out at the knee, too. He wasn’t sure he would be able to put weight on his right leg, but it held him as he walked, though blood ran down into his shoe. He pulled up his trouser leg. Like Kathleen, he had gashes from grenade fragments, but they didn’t look deep or serious.
He reached down and helped her to her feet. Almost absently, he asked, “Now do you see why I asked you not to come with me?”
She nodded, but then she said, “If I hadn’t, you never would have recognized the fat man, would you?”
“No, I don’t suppose we would,” Bushell admitted. His tone of voice changed as he added, “I’m glad you’re not badly hurt.” He didn’t care to think about what might have happened had they been standing up when the grenade went off.
He followed Sam Stanley toward the fat man’s corpse. All along Lansdowne Street, shopkeepers had come out of their establishments to see what the gunfire meant. They stared in disbelief at the body on the pavement. Had they heard gunfire more often, they would have had the sense to take cover instead of running out to investigate. Bushell envied them their quiet, secure little worlds. Major Harris was also approaching the cabinetmaker’s shop. “Have you got a weapon?” Bushell called to him. When he shook his head, Bushell waved him back: “Then get out of the line of fire.” Whoever ran the cabinetmaker’s hadn’t come out with the rest of the local merchants. Bushell did not think that boded well.
Stanley had not gone right up to the dead body; he’d halted where nobody could shoot at him from the doorway of the cabinetmaker’s. The door was slightly ajar. Bushell glanced at Stanley. “We go in?” he said. It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.
“We go in,” Stanley said with a nod. “We’ve got the guns, looks like we’ll need them, and it doesn’t look like anybody else thought to bring any.”
“Nobody believes it till it happens in his backyard.” Bushell tried to remember what he’d seen about the layout of the cabinetmaker’s shop when he walked past it on his way to Yawkey’s. He said, “I’ll go in first and break to the left. You’re taller than I am; that’ll give you a shot over my shoulder.”
“Got it.” Stanley shook his head. “And I thought I was done with combat. On three?” He didn’t wait for Bushell to agree, but started counting: “One, two ... “
Yelling like fiends, they ran for the door. Bushell hit it with his shoulder. It flew open. He dashed inside. Behind the counter stood two men. He recognized Joseph Kilbride’s tough Irish face, twisted now into a grimace of hate. “Hold it!” he screamed.
Kilbride was already holding it - a grenade like the one the fat man had thrown. He’d pulled the pin; he was holding the detonator down with his thumb. He drew back his arm. Bushell remembered a Franco-Spanish grenadier springing up from behind a rock, somewhere near the Nuevespañolan border. The man standing beside Kilbride - perhaps the proprietor of the shop - dropped to the floor. As Kilbride’s arm started to come forward, Bushell and Stanley both fired. One slug hit Kilbride in the chest, the other in the flattened bridge of the nose. He let out a grunt of astonishment and toppled. His grenade fell beside him - and beside the man who’d taken shelter in back of the counter. A moment later, the grenade detonated. Casing fragments rattled off the walls and ceiling. A bubbling shriek burst from the throat of Kilbride’s companion, then faded.
Pistols still at the ready, Bushell and Stanley ran around the counter to see what they could do to keep the fellow from expiring on the spot. As soon as they saw him, they looked at each other in dismay. The grenade had fallen by his face and neck. Fragments must have cut his carotids, for he was bleeding like a butchered hog.
“We’ll never save him,” Bushell said. “No point to trying.”
Stanley looked down at his face once more - or rather, the shattered bone and burnt and diced meat where his face had been. “You’re right, Chief,” he said in a faraway voice. “Lucky for him that we can’t, too.”