Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

his head regretfully. “You don’t know what’s going on here, do you? You live here in this town with your head in the ground and you don’t see a damn thing that’s going on.”
    I felt like I was doing math in my head. It was exhausting me just to listen to him, just to try to keep up. I could put the numbers together, just slowly. It took a minute for the bell to ring. When it did my jaw went slack.
    “Chief, are you telling me what I think you’re telling me?”
    “Too many blows to the head, MacManus?” He paused. “All this time he’s been telling you I’m the monster. He’s been telling you, I bet, that any day now I was going to bust down your door and slap a made-up charge on you. He wanted to keep you scared and in line. You could be more easily coerced then. Meanwhile, I’m at my desk counting the holes burning in my gut. I wasn’t even allowed to go anywhere near you, and there you were in constant fear of me. The man knows what he’s doing. He played you like a plywood violin.”
    “You’re just telling me bullshit, Chief. Frank’s clever, but he’s not that clever.” What I was really saying was, I wasn’t that stupid. I heard my voice and it sounded exactly like what I was, a panicked man clinging to his fixed perspective of a suddenly changing world. The floor had been yanked out from beneath me, and I was afraid to look directly at all that might now lie below.
    The Chief said, “Who put you and Augie at the scene of the accident? Frank, right?”
    “Why would he do that?”
    “He wanted you and Augie there to witness the crash, so you could tell everyone it was a terrible accident and nothing more. There was no errant son-in-law for you to tail. You were there to see a murder disguised as an accident and tell the papers and everyone who cared that that’s just what it was.”
    “Wait, what does Frank have to do with the accident?”
    “You still haven’t figured it out. Frank killed the Curry girl. Frank blew out her tires to make it look like an accident, and my men covered it up. Jesus, MacManus, Frank’s been running this thing all along. He killed Amy Curry, and that was just for starters.”
    I stared at the Chief. It was all I could do. I said nothing. I wondered why I felt as much betrayal as anger. Frank was not a friend, or a colleague. Frank was what I didn’t want to be – greedy, mean, blind. He was the mirror reflection by which I judged myself. And now that reflection had deceived me. It had deceived me all long.
    The Chief was my enemy, and I was his, and that had kept my world simple. He was the extent of evil in my town, he and only he held my back against the wall. But now I was to accept that there was another whole world beyond that wall, and in it roamed free the man who held both of our chains.
    “What do you mean, ‘for starters’?” I said.
    “He ordered the hit on Augie.”
    “Hit?”
    “The two men that came to his house, they were sent there to kill him.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he was taking pictures, getting nosy. Frank got nervous.”
    “So the man Augie killed had a gun.”
    “Of course he did. My men removed it from the scene, locked it away. Augie survived two tours of duty as a marine in Nam. He spent twenty-five years working undercover for the DEA. It’s impossible for him to panic and shoot an unarmed man.” He smiled then. “I can only imagine those two fools not knowing what hit them. Augie’s a tough son of a bitch. That’s why Frank sent two.”
    Hearing of the existence of the gun gave me a burst of hope. It was like a rush of adrenaline. It was almost enough to matter. I felt that I had to do something with that information.
    “How are you doing so far, MacManus? Still with me?”
    I didn’t answer that. I was onto another thought upon which I had only a casual grasp at best. I didn’t want to lose it.
    “So the man who sacked me outside the Hansom House, he worked for Frank?”
    “Yeah, at that point you weren’t a threat to Frank. He didn’t think you could come anywhere near him, so there was no reason to kill you. He felt he could still use you. But then you got close, Frank got nervous, and that’s when he decided to have you killed.”
    I tried to keep up but couldn’t. My mind snagged on something. The man who’s knee I popped, whom I found and brought to Frank, whom Frank sent walking into the freezing Atlantic – this man worked for Frank. By finding him, I had without knowing it surprised