Free Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel by Bruce DeSilva

veteran reporter bolt from his bed and grope for his gun. Larry knew only one English phrase, and he didn’t squawk it often; but when he did, Mulligan had to fight the urge to strangle him.
    Mulligan brushed his teeth, tugged on his jeans, pulled on a Boston Red Sox T-shirt with Jacoby Ellsbury’s number 2 on the back, and was tying his black Reeboks when the fucker said it:
    “Yankees win. Theeeeeeee Yankees win!”
    Mulligan couldn’t figure it. Why would a guy name a bird after one of the greatest sports heroes in New England history and then teach it to talk that crap? But there was no way to find out now, because the asshole responsible for this abomination was dead.
    Mulligan would have preferred a dog—a big one that would jump all over him when he came home from work, curl up beside him when he rooted for the Sox on TV, and snore contentedly every night at the foot of his bed. After several recent disappointments, he’d come to believe that the love of a dog was preferable to the love of a woman. Dogs were unwaveringly faithful, and not a one had ever lied to him. But the landlord didn’t allow dogs in this run-down tenement building in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood; and with Mulligan’s crazy hours, there was no way he could take care of one anyway.
    The asshole, a small-time heroin dealer, had been sitting on the stoop outside his apartment in the Chad Brown housing project last Wednesday when a white Escalade rolled up, the passenger-side window slid down, and a dozen nine-millimeter slugs stuttered out. An hour later, Mulligan ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and yanked his reporter’s notebook from his hip pocket. He doubted he’d need it, but he figured on being ready in case the investigating detective broke precedent and said something worth printing in The Providence Dispatch . They’d just started wrangling when a uniform lugged a big brass cage out of the apartment and set it down in the blood on the stoop.
    “Oops,” he said. “Sorry about that, Sarge.”
    “No biggie,” the detective said.
    “Really? Didn’t I just compromise the physical evidence?”
    “Compromise?” Mulligan said.
    “It’s what they’re taught to say at the Police Academy,” the detective said, “when what they really mean is ‘fuck up.’”
    “Oh, shit,” the uniform said. “I can’t believe I did that.”
    “Doesn’t matter, kid,” the detective said.
    “It doesn’t?”
    “It might if we went to trial,” the detective said, “but it’s not like we’re ever gonna ID the shooter.”
    Mulligan and the detective watched the uniform lift the cage from the stoop. A little metal sign clipped to the bars read: “Larry Bird.” Inside the cage, a midnight-blue macaw squatted and took a dump.
    “Looks like you’ve got a witness,” Mulligan said.
    “Yeah,” the uniform said, “he must have heard the whole thing go down, but the shit-bird ain’t talking. I don’t think he likes cops.”
    “Birds of a feather,” Mulligan said, and immediately regretted the cliché.
    “You got that right,” the detective said. He pointed at the fresh graffiti scrawled next to the apartment door: If you see something, don’t say anything.
    “Handsome bird,” Mulligan said.
    “If you want it, it’s yours,” the detective said.
    “You serious?”
    “Why not? The skel with all the holes in him won’t be feeding it anymore, and I’d just as soon avoid dealing with the lazy pricks at Animal Control.”
    Which was how Larry Bird found a new home in Mulligan’s kitchen and promptly dedicated himself to soiling it.
    Mulligan finished tying his shoes, filled Larry’s food tray, got pecked on the hand for his trouble, and told the bird to go fuck himself. Then he shrugged on his bomber jacket and went out the apartment door. He trotted down one flight of worn wooden stairs and stepped out into a cold morning rain.
    *   *   *
    Gloria Costa unfurled her purple umbrella, stepped off the