Beach Road

Chapter 106. Kate

JOYOUS NEIGHBORS AND friends carrying food and drink show up at Marie’s an hour after the verdict, but the celebration doesn’t officially begin until Dante, a foaming bottle of champagne in one hand, scissors in the other, snips through the tangle of yellow police tape that sealed his bedroom for nearly a year. When the last sticky piece has been ripped away, he and his pals rush into the room like a liberating army.

“This is for my homeboy Dunleavy,” says Dante, do

Then he tosses the other twenty-eight-the Miami Heat cap is still in a plastic bag in Riverhead somewhere-to his crew, and for the rest of the party, wherever I turn, brand-new gleaming caps bob jauntily above the fray.

As for me, I haven’t been dry-eyed ten minutes since the verdict came down. All I have to do is see Marie gaze up at her grandson, or Tom and Jeff with their arms around each other, or the relief on Clarence’s exhausted face for the tears to flow again. After a while, I don’t even bother wiping them away.

Now Macklin bangs on the kitchen table and shouts, “Order in the court! I said, order in the court!” And the room erupts in a riot of whistles, catcalls, and stomping feet.

“Anyone recognize this?” he says, waving a familiar wooden stick and sounding at least a couple drinks to the good. “Let’s just say that tight-ass Rothstein will have to find something else to beat on his poor pew. Because I wasn’t leaving that courtroom without a souvenir.

“Goddamn it, Dante. I’m proud of you,” says Macklin. “I don’t know how you hung so tough, but based on what I see in your grandmother, I’m not surprised. I hope someday you can look back on this bullshit and feel you got something out of it. Anything. And now I want to hear from the brilliant and gorgeous Kate Costello.”

When the room twists toward me and cheers, I open my mouth to see what will fall out.

“To Dante!” I say, raising my champagne. “And your long-overdue freedom! And to Marie! And your long-overdue freedom! I’m so relieved Tom and I didn’t let you down. I love you both.” Then I lose it again as Dante and Marie rescue me in their arms.

“What my partner was trying to say, Dante,” says Tom, picking up my toast like a dropped baton, “is you’ll be getting our bill in the morning.”

The highly emotional toasts and festivities roll on without letting up. I go over and stand by Macklin and Marie while Tom steps outside to join the revelers dancing in the yard to Outkast, Nelly, James Brown, and Marvin Gaye. Half an hour later, a peal of thunder rips through the joyous din, and the clouds that have been swelling all afternoon spill open.

The downpour sends half the neighborhood ru

“It’s Sean. Seems my nephew just got dumped by his girl. I didn’t even know he had one, but I guess he did, because he’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff.”

“You need to go talk to him?”

“I think so.”

“Well, give him a hug for me.”

“I will. And when I get back, I have a surprise.”

“I don’t know if I can take any more surprises right now.”

“It’s a good one. I promise,” says Tom, then gestures toward Mack and Marie. “Am I hallucinating, or are those two holding hands?”

Chapter 107. Loco

WHEN BOY WONDER comes around the back of that shitty little trailer and walks across the muddy yard, he looks so different it sends a quicksilver shiver up my spine.

It’s like I can barely recognize him, and I have this awful feeling that when he gets to Costello’s car, where I have been waiting for forty-five minutes like he asked, he’s not going to recognize me either. Or if he does, it’s going to be like we’re nothing but acquaintances and the last eight years never happened.

Boy Wonder is such a cu

A week later, he took me to Nick and Tony’s and picked out a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine that he barely touched. He kept filling mine though, and on the ride home, when I could barely sit up, he made what he called “a modest little proposal.” I should leave the high school kids to the amateurs and instead help him take over the whole Hampton drug trade. “It’s nothing but fu

I was all of seventeen at the time, a high school junior. What did I know? But the Boy Wonder knew exactly what he was about, and with him doing the thinking and me the heavy lifting, it wasn’t long before the money arrived in sacks.

Boy Wonder was smart about that too. Said that if we started living like pimps, the cops would be sniffing around us in months. So for eight years we lived like monks, nothing changing in our lives except the number in the bank accounts he’d opened in Antigua and Barbados.

Since then, it’s just been a matter of hanging on to what we took, or what Boy Wonder calls “our franchise.”

That’s been no problem either. Ruthlessness is one of Boy Wonder’s strong suits, right up there with cagey thinking, and I guess I’m no slouch in that department either. But I’ll tell you, it’s impossible to figure out what BW is thinking-always has been.

It’s coming down in buckets now, but BW ambles through the rain like it’s exactly what he needs to wash him clean. Maybe it is. I know better than anyone what he is capable of doing and living with. I stood next to him as he put a bullet in Feifer, Walco, and Rochie, them bawling for their moms until the last second.

And for what? Stealing a thousand dollars’ worth of crack. Doing some small-time dealing. That’s all it was. More of a prank than stealing, since the next day Feif and Rochie came around with the cash, plus interest.

But BW wouldn’t let me take the money. He said we had to send a message. A strong message. It was psycho but cu

But as Boy Wonder opens the door of the car, he seems so transformed and remote, his old name doesn’t seem to fit anymore. And when he slides behind the wheel and gives me his chilly “What’s up?” I fall back on what I called him for fifteen years before he showed up that night at the police station.

“Hell if I know,” I say. “What’s up with you, Tom?”

That gets his attention. Never using real names is even stricter with us than not spending money, and before he can catch it, he flashes the same hard look he gave Feifer, Walco, and Rochie right before he shot them through the eyes. Then he covers it with a smile and asks, “Why you calling me Tom, Sean?”

“Because the party’s over, Uncle. We’re done.”