Free House Revenge by Mike Lawson

Roy said.
    Ray didn’t answer. He was watching Spiegleman move up the stairs.
    DeMarco was in the office of Superintendent Francis O’Rourke, the man in charge of BPD’s Bureau of Field Services. O’Rourke was a slender, scholarly-looking man in his late fifties with wire-rimmed glasses and short gray hair. He was dressed in his uniform blues, not a suit. On the I-love-me wall behind his desk were photos of a young O’Rourke as a patrolman and one of him dressed in body armor with a SWAT team. In addition to a dozen plaques and framed certificates attesting to his service to the city of Boston, there was also a glass case holding a folded American flag and the medals O’Rourke had received when he was in the military. DeMarco noticed that one of O’Rourke’s medals was a Purple Heart.
    The Bureau of Field Services, per the department’s website, had “primary responsibility for the implementation of Community Policing and the delivery of effective and efficient police services to the community”—among other things. Mahoney had given him O’Rourke’s name, saying that; O’Rourke was the senior cop in the department responsible for protecting Elinore Dobbs.
    And DeMarco got the impression that O’Rourke genuinely cared about Elinore—although he may have been faking it to stay on Mahoney’s good side. To reach his level in the bureaucracy, O’Rourke had probably developed some acting skills.
    â€œYou have to understand, there’s only so much we can do,” O’Rourke said. “I have patrol cars in the area and one of my men will stop in and check on Elinore periodically. But unless Callahan or those two thugs he’s got working for him do something illegal—I mean something more than turning off the power—I can’t arrest them.”
    â€œTell me about the thugs,” DeMarco said.
    O’Rourke shook his head. “They’re a couple of rabid dogs. The older one, Ray, did a year when he was seventeen for stealing a car. It was actually the third time he’d been popped for grand theft auto but after getting two free passes, the judge gave him a year at Westborough. After that, he and his brother have been arrested multiple times, but haven’t actually spent all that much time in jail. The arrests were for drug possession, DUIs, shoplifting, stuff like that. One time when gasoline prices were high, they ran around for six months siphoning gas from all the cars in their neighborhood until they finally got caught.
    â€œBut mostly they’ve been arrested for assault, usually bar fights. Some citizen would piss them off—and it doesn’t take much to piss them off—and they’d double-team the guy and pound him into hamburger. The longest time they spent in jail was two years when they damn near killed a guy who annoyed them at a Red Sox game. But their records don’t tell the whole story. They got a bar in Revere . . .”
    DeMarco knew Revere was a suburb five miles north of Boston.
    â€œ. . . and after Mahoney called me, I talked to the chief who runs the department there. He told me the McNultys are hooked up with the mob down in Providence. They’re like . . . You ever been to a Home Depot and seen those guys standing outside looking for work? You know, day laborers? That’s what the McNultys are for the Providence mob. If they need a couple guys to drive a truck to pick up or deliver something, they’ll call the McNultys if they don’t have anyone else handy. The main thing they use them for is cigarettes.”
    â€œCigarettes?”
    â€œYeah. Cigarette smuggling is a big deal. An article in the Globe said it’s costing the state as much as two hundred and fifty million a year in lost revenue.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” DeMarco said.
    â€œYou know how much a pack of Marlboros costs in Boston? Almost nine bucks. It’s even higher in