Serpents in the Cold Read Free Page B

along the waterfront, some office space downtown and in Post Office Square. Every so often something would come up—a week or two worth of work with the potential for something long-term—and he’d call in the numbers of those who he knew needed the work the most.
    Of course, the business was more than just a security company, despite his attempts to make it only that. But when Boston’s economy went south, he’d had to take whatever he could, and there were always people looking for someone like him to get things done. And the people in the neighborhood, who needed things done, who didn’t trust the police or couldn’t call them, reached out to him for help. There were wives whose absentee husbands refused to pay child support; families with loved ones in Suffolk or Charlestown jail and no way to post bond or hire a lawyer; employers who suspected their workers of pilfering goods or stealing from the till; debt collectors and loan sharks who needed to be squeezed back just a little bit; the husband or wife who believed their spouse was cheating on them; the sister who didn’t believe the story of how her brother died.
    He liked to think that he’d found a way to make a living and pay the bills from what he knew how to do and what he was good at, and that once the economy got better and everyone was back on their feet, he’d get back to running his security company and to hell with everything else, but he also found it hard to leave behind what he’d done as a cop, doing what he thought mattered, which in the end, he’d discovered, had little to do with the law. Perhaps more than that, he often wondered if he was trying to make right all his wrongs from the war.
    The windows to the second-floor offices of Pilgrim Security were dark and shuttered, and when he climbed the stairs, snow melting from his shoes onto the worn green carpeting, he found the door locked. The rippled glass painted with the company name was in need of cleaning. Cal stared at the door. One of the children whose parents worked on the floor had been peering into the dark room; a small greasy handprint was smeared on the glass. The white cardboard sign announcing PASSPORT PHOTOS TAKEN HERE and NOTARY PUBLIC hung crookedly at the center of the window. The hallway smelled of boiling cabbage—a wet and ripe, sweaty smell—and of something burnt—eggs perhaps. Voices came muted through other doors: a radio, a telex, and farther down the hall from Franklin Professional Services came the clickety-clack of secretaries at work, of typewriters and the thump and hum of Dictaphones and mimeographs, the sudden short bark of a woman’s laugh.
    Later, Cal stood just inside the building’s entranceway, smoking a cigarette and trying to avoid the wind. Dante might be at Mike Piloti’s garage on Summer Street or even out at Uphams Corner Auto doing a bit of spot-welding, as he sometimes did to put cash in his pocket, but then he remembered Dante had put in some hours at his cousin’s garage last week right before the latest storm, and as long as Dante could make enough to get by, he wouldn’t be looking to make more. And if he had cash in his pockets, he’d give himself over to something else. Cal just hoped he was on the bottle rather than the junk.
      
    THE DOOR TO Dante’s apartment was unlocked. Cal knocked, and when there came no reply, he entered. Dante’s younger sister, Claudia, sat at the small Formica-topped table in the kitchen. She wore a blue housecoat, bare feet in oversized worn slippers. Pale varicose flesh nestled in thick tufts of fake fur around the ankle. She was sitting sideways in the chair and staring out the window. Her hands lay in her lap, unmoving. Her hair looked damp and hung in lank strings on either side of her ashen face. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and her lips appeared white, bloodless. A cigarette smoldered in a World’s Fair ashtray on the vinyl tablecloth.
    “Claudia,” Cal said and resisted the impulse to