“This guy,” I said, “destroyed the life of-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Stevie said mildly, and tightened his hand against my shoulder. “I don’t give a shit about you or your problems. My problems are the only thing that matter here. You are an annoyance. I’m not asking you to stop. I’m telling you. Take a good look at your friend up there, Kenzie.”
I looked. Bubba sat down again, bit into his burger.
“He’s a great earner. I’d miss a guy like that. But if I hear you’re bothering this independent contractor friend of mine? Making inquiries? Mentioning his name to people? I hear any of that, and I’ll whack out your buddy. I’ll cut his fucking head off and mail it to you. And then I’ll kill you, Kenzie.” He patted my shoulder several times. “We clear?”
“We’re clear,” I said.
He withdrew his arm, puffed his cigar, leaned forward with elbows on his knees. “That’s great. When he finishes his burger, you take your Irish ass out of my home.” He stood and began to walk toward the deck. “And wipe your feet on the mat before you walk back through the house. Fucking rug in the living room is a bitch to clean.”
23
Bubba can barely read or write. He has just enough rudimentary skills in that area to decipher weapons manuals and other simple instruction texts as long as they’re accompanied by diagrams. He can read his own press clippings, but it takes him half an hour, and he runs into trouble if he can’t sound out the words phonetically. He has no grasp of complex dynamics in any type of human intercourse, knows so little about politics that as recently as last year I had to explain to him what the difference between the House and the Senate was, and his ignorance of current events is so total that the only thing he understands about Lewinsky is as a verb.
But he is not stupid.
There are those who have assumed, fatally as it turned out, that he was, and countless cops and DAs have managed through all their concerted effort to imprison him only twice, both times on weapons infractions so minor compared to what he was truly guilty of that the terms seemed more like vacation time than punishment.
Bubba has traversed the world a few times over and can tell you where to get the best vodka in former Eastern bloc villages you’ve never heard of, how to find a clean brothel in West Africa, and where to get a cheeseburger in Laos. Sitting atop tables scattered throughout the three-story warehouse he calls home, Bubba has constructed from memory Popsicle-stick models of several cities he’s visited; I once checked his version of Beirut against a map and found a small street in Bubba’s model the mapmakers had missed.
But where Bubba’s intelligence is most prominent and most unnerving is in his innate ability to read people without having appeared to even notice them. Bubba can smell an undercover cop from a mile away; he can find a lie in the quiver of an eyelash; and his knack for sensing an ambush is so legendary in his circles that his competitors long ago quit trying and simply allowed him to carve out his slice of pie.
Bubba, Morty Schwartz told me not long before he died, was an animal. Morty meant it as a compliment. Bubba had flawless reflexes, unswerving instinct, and primal focus, and none of these skills were diluted or compromised by conscience. If Bubba had ever had conscience or guilt, he’d left them back in Poland along with his mother tongue when he was five years old.
“So what’d Stevie say?” Bubba asked as we drove through Maverick Square and headed for the tunnel.
I had to be careful here. If Bubba suspected Stevie was using him against me, he’d kill Stevie and half his crew, consequences be damned.
“Nothing much.”
Bubba nodded. “He just called you to his house to shoot the shit?”
“Something like that.”
“Sure,” Bubba said.
I cleared my throat. “He told me Wesley Dawe has diplomatic immunity. I’m to stay away.”
Bubba rolled down his window as we approached the tollbooths outside the Sumner Tunnel. “What could some yuppie psycho be worth to Stevie Zambuca?”
“Apparently a lot.”
Somehow Bubba managed to squeeze his Hummer in between the tollbooths, handed the operator three bucks, and rolled his window back up as we joined the eight lanes trying to cram their way into two.
“But how?” he said, and maneuvered the double-wide freakish machine through the throng of metal like it was a letter opener.
I shrugged as we entered the tunnel. “Wesley’s already proven he has access to one psychiatrist’s files. Maybe he has access to others.”
“And?”
“And,” I said, “that access could give him private information on judges, cops, contractors, you name it.”
“So what are you gonna do?” Bubba asked.
“Back off,” I said.
His faced was bathed in the sickly yellow wash of the tunnel lights when he turned his head and looked at me. “You?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m no dummy.”
“Huh,” Bubba said softly, and looked back out the windshield.
“I’ll just let things cool down,” I said, hating the hint of desperation I heard in my voice. “Figure out another way to come at Wesley.”
“There ain’t no other way,” Bubba said. “You either take this guy down or you don’t. You do, and Stevie’ll figure out it was you no matter how you cover your tracks.”
“So, what, you’re saying I should take down Wesley and hand over the rest of my life to Stevie Zambuca?”
“I can talk to him,” Bubba said. “Reason with him.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Yeah, no. You talk to him, right? And let’s say his position doesn’t change. Where’s that put you? Asking for something he ain’t going to give.”
“So then I ice his ass.”
“And then? You whack a made guy, everyone’s going to say, No problem?”
Bubba shrugged as we rolled through the mouth of the tunnel and out into the North End. “I don’t think that far ahead.”
“I do.”
He gave me another shrug, a harder one. “So you’re just going to back down?”
“Yeah. That okay with you?”
“Fine,” he said distantly. “Fine, man. Whatever.”
He didn’t look at me when he dropped me off. He kept his eyes on the road, his head moving slightly in time with the chug of the engine.