Page 148 of The Chain

It’s the mid-1960s and there are a lot of opportunities for a young man on the make. Sometimes you have to smack a few people around.

Sometimes you have to do a lot worse.

Red stains on the floor of a Dorchester shebeen.

Red all over the walls of a snitch’s basement apartment.

Red the hands. Red the eyes. Rooms full of red.

Red’s wife runs off with another man to Michigan. Red footprints in the snow outside a house in Ann Arbor.

Red’s boy grows up and follows his old man into law enforcement.

Glory days.

Red-letter days.

Before the fall. Before that hippie bitch comes into his boy’s life.

He is an old man now. His hair is white. But the old Red is still there.

They think they can kill me?

I’m hard to kill.

Red picks himself up off the linen-closet floor where he has been recovering. He limps to the room next to the library. Smoke is everywhere. The house is on fire. He finds the first-aid kit. He looks at the shotgun wound in his side. He’s had worse. Worse in that gun battle with hoods in ’77. Worse when a collection went wrong in Revere in ’85.

A younger man then, though. A much younger man.

He’s bleeding bad. Red the bandages. Red the lint. He limps to the gun rack. There’s yelling and shooting coming from the old abattoir outside.

He gets himself an M16 with an underslung M203 grenade launcher.

The only weapon to choose when you need something more convincing.

He staggers to the kitchen, coughing in the thick black smoke.

The hurt is incredible. At least four broken ribs and probably a punctured lung. But he’ll get through it. Red would get through it and he’s still Red even if his hair is white.

He staggers out into the blizzard and shuffles toward the back of the old slaughterhouse.

One step at a time through searing pain.

He blinks the snow out of his eyes.

It’s only fifty feet but it might as well be fifty yards.

He is reduced to crawling. His outbreaths are frothing blood. Definitely a punctured lung.

He reaches the rear door of the abattoir. The death entrance.

Red on the dirt. Red the handrail and the snow.

Breathing is hard. He has only one working lung and that is filling with blood too.

He climbs the last concrete step and peers over the lip of the back door.

The arc light is on and he can see everything.