Free One-Way Ticket by William G. Tapply

the blinking button and said, “Dalt? What’s up? Everything all right?”
    “No,” he said. “Everything is not all right. We gotta talk.”
    “Sure. Okay. Fire away.”
    “Not on the phone. Can you come over?”
    “You at the restaurant?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll be done here in about an hour,” I said, “I guess I can be there around five-thirty. How’s that?”
    “Good,” he said. “Thanks. See you then.”
    It took me about half an hour to walk from my office in Copley Square to Dalt’s restaurant, the Boston Scrod, in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which was also called, for reasons I never understood, the Quincy Market. The Scrod was right around the corner from the venerable Durgin Park restaurant, famous for its platter-sized slabs of prime rib and its surly South Boston waitresses. Evie and I had eaten at the Scrod a few times, and we liked it. The restaurant on the second floor claimed that it served nothing but fresh catch-of-the-day seafood. The entire first floor was a three-sided horseshoe-shaped oyster bar. The Scrod was famous for its extensive oyster menu. Oysters from Nova Scotia and Maine, Long Island and Nantucket, British Columbia and Bristol Bay. Before I went there, I had no idea that oysters came in so many sizes, shapes, textures, and tastes. All, as my friend J. W. Jackson would say, were delish. You could also get an excellent Bloody Mary at the bar, as well as dozens of New England microbrewed beers and ales.
    The Scrod was popular with the locals, always a good sign. Dalt seemed to be doing a good job managing it.
    At five-thirty on this sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, the brick plaza outside the restaurant was, thronged with tourists from Iowa snapping digital photographs, businessfolk from the financial district just getting out of work, and street performers looking for handouts and applause. I weaved my way among them, went inside, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the door to Dalton Lancaster’s office.
    His muffled voice called, “Come on in,” so in I went.
    The door opened into a room that reminded me of my recent visit to Paulie Russo’s office in another restaurant, except Dalt’s was a little smaller than Russo’s, with more expensive furniture, and it was occupied only by Dalt Lancaster. Not a thug in sight.
    He was on the phone. When I closed the door behind me, he looked up, nodded quickly, and turned his head away. From where I stood inside the doorway, I couldn’t see the bruised and beaten side of Dalt’s face, the left side. I figured he’d turned away from me so that I couldn’t overhear what he was saying into the telephone. So I made a point of not listening.
    Dalt could’ve been renting his office by the week. Its only decoration was a large authentic-looking sepia-toned map hanging on the wall beside the desk. It showed colonial Boston back in the day when Back Bay was still under water. On one wall, a floor-to-ceiling window looked down on the Faneuil Hall plaza. A pair of oak file cabinets and a freestanding steel-and-glass bookcase stood against one wall. The shelves were packed with three-ring binders and stacks of manila folders and magazines. A few small framed photos were lined up on one of the shelves. The big desk and the chairs and the side table were steel and glass and black leather. A computer and a printer and a telephone console sat on the desk. The carpet was a red-and-blue Oriental. It was the office of a man who’d had many other offices, considered them workplaces, understood that all workplaces were temporary, and let somebody else furnish and decorate them.
    After a minute, Dalt mumbled something into the phone, hung up, turned, and smiled quickly at me, as if he hadn’t noticed me come in. “Brady,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Have a seat.”
    Now I saw that the left side of his face had turned a sickly greenish yellow. It was a week-old bruise, and it was the same color as Robert’s. Father and son with their