Free Sacred by Dennis Lehane Page B

took Harvard to confer it, and he himself proudly displayed his own doctoral certificate from Cornell on the wall of hiswarehouse loft. In physics, no less. Not bad for a guy who’d dropped out of St. Bartholomew’s Parochial in the third grade.
    He’d been downsizing his weapons operation for years, but it was that (as well as the disappearance of a few wise guys over the years) for which he was best known. Late last year, he’d been rousted, and the cops found an unregistered Tokarev 9mm taped to his wheel well. There are very few certainties in this life, but in Massachusetts, if you’re found with an unregistered fire-arm on your person, it is certain that you’re going to spend a mandatory year in jail.
    Bubba’s attorney had kept him out of jail as long as he could, but the waiting was over now. Tomorrow night, by nine, Bubba had to report to Plymouth Correctional to serve out his sentence.
    He didn’t mind particularly; most of his friends were there. The few left on the outside were joining him tonight at Declan’s.
    Declan’s in Upham’s Corner sits amid a block of boarded-up storefronts and condemned houses on Stoughton Street directly across from a cemetery. It’s a five-minute walk from my house, but it’s a walk through the epitome of slow but certain urban decay and rot. The streets around Declan’s rise steeply toward Meeting House Hill, but the homes there always seem ready to slide in the other direction, crumble into themselves, and cascade down the hilly streets into the cemetery below, as if death is the only promise with any currency around here anymore.
    We found Bubba in the back, shooting pool with Nelson Ferrare and the Twoomey brothers, Danny and Iggy. Not exactly a brain trust, and they seemed to be burningthrough whatever cells were left by trading shots of grain alcohol.
    Nelson was Bubba’s sometime partner and knockabout pal. He was a small guy, dark and wiry, with a face that seemed set in a perpetual angry question mark. He rarely spoke, and when he did, he did so softly, as if afraid the wrong ears would hear, and there was something endearing about his shyness around women. But it wasn’t always easy feeling endearment toward a guy who’d once bitten off another guy’s nose in a barfight. And took it home as a souvenier.
    The Twoomey brothers were small-time button men for the Winter Hill Gang in Somerville, supposedly good with guns and driving getaway cars, but if a thought ever entered either of their heads it died from malnourishment. Bubba looked up from the pool table as we came into the back, bounded over to us.
    “Hot shit!” he said. “I knew you two wouldn’t let me down.”
    Angie kissed him and slid a pint of vodka into his hand. “Perish the thought, you knucklehead.”
    Bubba, far more effusive than usual, hugged me so hard I was sure I felt one of my ribs cave in.
    “Come on,” he said. “Do a shot with me. Hell, do two.”
    So it was going to be that kind of night.
     
    My recollection of that evening remains a bit hazy. Grain alcohol and vodka and beer will do that to you. But I remember betting on Angie as she ran the table against every guy stupid enough to put his quarters on it. And I remember sitting for a while with Nelson, apologizing profusely for getting his ribs broken four monthsago during the height of hysteria in the Gerry Glynn case.
    “’S okay,” he said. “Really. I met a nurse in the hospital. I think I love her.”
    “And how does she feel about you?”
    “I’m not sure. Something’s wrong with her phone, and I think she mighta moved and forgot to tell me.”
     
    Later, as Nelson and the Twoomey brothers ate really questionable-looking pizza at the bar, Angie and I sat with Bubba, our three pairs of heels up on the pool table, backs against the wall.
    “I’m going to miss all my shows,” Bubba said bitterly.
    “They have TV in prison,” I reminded him.
    “Yeah, but they’re monopolized by either the brothers or the