Page 71 of The Furies

Unfortunately, there were risks involved in monitoring her, because she’d be alert to signs of surveillance. Pantuff would be in favor of them continuing to keep their distance, but Veale could talk him around. The issue was this: To whom might she turn? Not the police, because they’d be happy to see her squirm. She couldn’t go to her husband’s people either, since she was lucky they hadn’t killed her along with him. It was possible that she could hire herself some muscle, but they’d be no match for Pantuff and Veale, not unless she went for the best—and the best cost money, which she claimed not to have. It was a quandary, and no mistake.

The toilet flushed, followed by the sound of Pantuff stepping into the shower. Veale killed the television, and with the absence of its background noise, his thinking cleared.

What if she does something stupid?

He realized he’d asked Pantuff the wrong question.

No, what if she does something smart?

CHAPTER IV

When Dave Evans called I was over by the Maine Mall, watching people pushing carts filled to overflowing with groceries, liquor, potato chips, and toilet paper. Elsewhere gun stores were having trouble keeping ammunition on their shelves, and even L.L. Bean had closed its doors, which was a sign of desperate times. The only thing missing was the voice of Orson Welles announcing that the Martians were closing in on New York.

“There’s a woman here asking for you,” said Dave. “She says she wants to hire you.”

I had a backlog of calls to return, and most of my messages I hadn’t even listened to yet. I guessed I’d be turning work down for a while, until it became clearer just how we were all supposed to function in this unnerving new world. I was going to struggle to tie up the cases I currently had on my slate, although three of them were corporates that could wait, and the fourth was legwork on a worker’s comp case for Moxie Castin. I’d spoken to Moxie earlier that morning, and he took the view that delays would be inevitable. Civil suits would have to take a back seat to felony cases until a vaccine was developed or everybody died. Moxie confessed to me that the pandemic had made him philosophical, causing him to reassess his professional existence. To that end he had divided his client list into those he hoped would survive, those he hoped would die, and those he hoped would die slowly.

“Tell her to leave a number,” I told Dave, “and I’ll get back to her when I can.”

My daughter Sam was in Burlington, Vermont, living with her mother and grandparents. I didn’t want to be any more isolated from Sam than I already was. If I packed a bag, I could find a place to stay nearby. I might even be able to rent an apartment and—

“She says she did leave a number,” said Dave, “and the call wasn’t returned, which is why she’s now in my bar.”

Dave sounded fractious, which was out of character. I couldn’t blame him. Everybody was fractious, so why should he be any different? Plus, he had a business to keep afloat, and staff to take care of. Right now he had more on his plate than a lot of other folk.

I heard a woman’s voice in the background. Dave spoke again, repeating what had been said.

“She asked me to tell you that it’s urgent,” he said. “Also, she says her name is Sarah Abelli, but she used to be Sarah Sawyer. She’s Nate Sawyer’s widow.”

“The Nate Sawyer?” I asked.

Dave relayed the question back to her.

“The very same, she says. Should I know who he was?”

“Better you don’t,” I said. “This can only mean trouble.”

“With respect,” said Dave, “it’s not like anyone ever comes to you because they’ve struck gold. Now are you going to speak with her or not? Because I’m kind of busy trying to prepare for the apocalypse.”

Outside Books-A-Million, a woman was loading the trunk of her car with boxes of discounted novels. Perhaps there was yet hope for humanity.

“Tell her I’m on my way,” I said.

“I’ll make sure she listens out for your trumpet.”

“Wait,” I said, “was that sarcasm?”

But Dave had already hung up.

CHAPTER V

The name Nathaniel Sawyer was not one usually associated with Italian mobsters, but this specific Nate Sawyer bucked that trend. He had operated as a bagman and enforcer for the Office, as the Patriarca crime family out of Providence, Rhode Island, styled itself. Sawyer’s mother, Luciana Morati, had married Nate’s father, Royce, more out of necessity than desire, the latter having run its course after a couple of unsatisfactory sessions in the back seats of cars, but not before she had conceived a son. Royce Sawyer was the runt of a once proud Connecticut litter, with looks but a dearth of charm, and expensive tastes but a lack of money. The marriage didn’t last and Royce decamped to Australia, never to be heard from again. Luciana went back to her own people in Lenox Dale, with the shadow of a failed relationship hanging over her. Her son, Nate, screwed around for a while before eventually entering the orbit of the Office’s Boston underboss Sam Ricci, otherwise known as Sam the Chef, since he operated out of the back of a restaurant on Route 1 in Saugus. The restaurant stood on the same lot as an impotency treatment clinic, so Sam Ricci was sometimes referred to as Sammy Dryfire, but only out of earshot of the man himself.

Nate Sawyer’s mongrel heritage made him an outsider, but outsiders have their uses, especially in an organization like the Office. The Patriarcas had endured a succession of bad times: the jailing of the boss Peter Limone in 1968 for a gangland murder he didn’t commit, resulting in thirty-three years in prison—ten of them on death row—before his release and a settlement of $26 million for wrongful imprisonment, which was small recompense for spending the best part of his life behind bars; the brief, disastrous reign of Raymond Patriarca Jr. in the eighties; and his successor, “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, turning government witness in the nineties upon discovering that some of his own associates had ratted him out to the FBI.

After this checkered history, and the media interest it attracted, the Office made a conscious decision to place a premium on discretion, and did its best not to draw attention to its activities. It never quite succeeded, but the intention was admirable, if nothing else about the Office was. Nate Sawyer played his part in all this, being regarded as a safe pair of hands, but he was also a louse: crude and cruel, a bully both inside and beyond the walls of his own home, a man who was only ever comfortable in the company of those more ignorant than himself. It probably shouldn’t have come as any surprise when it emerged that Sawyer had been an FBI informant for the best part of a decade, ever since the Bureau had uncovered evidence of Sawyer’s skimming from his employers that would have earned him a beating followed by a bullet behind the ear. Nate Sawyer had been more cunning than anyone suspected.

Regrettably for him, just as he was preparing to make the final jump to federal witness, followed by his absorption into the protection program, Sawyer killed an undercover policeman after what he claimed was the accidental discharge of his weapon during a robbery at a liquor warehouse in Gloucester, Mass. The fact that the cop had been hit three times didn’t help Sawyer’s case, and the subsequent revelation of his snitch past made him persona non grata with his own people, who now got in line with law enforcement and the FBI to make what remained of his life a misery, the Bureau in particular being profoundly embarrassed that one of its sources was a cop killer. Despite being held in protective custody at the state prison in Concord, Sawyer never made it to trial. Someone put thallium in his food, and he died on Christmas Eve, 2017.

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