Brutal by Kevin Weeks Page A

staring at Jimmy in the Tow Truck, thinking there would be no escape for Halloran. I wasn’t upset or nervous or scared. It was a whole different feeling, with all my senses heightened and the adrenaline starting to flow big-time. I’d only seen Halloran twice in my life, both times at the Black Rose in Faneuil Hall, but I knew time was running out for him. And I knew I was a part of that fact. But, as I had learned earlier in life, the human mind can justify anything, and I was having no problem justifying my role here. After all, once Jimmy made his mind up that Halloran had to go, it was gonna happen. With or without me. Jimmy was tapping me for the job, and there would be no way I could walk away.
    Not that I’d want to. I was working for the top gangster in the city, a cold-blooded murderer, and I’d always known that if he asked me to kill someone, I would do it. It didn’t bother me to live like this. I knew a lot of people couldn’t handle what was about to happen. They’d become nervous wrecks, but it didn’t faze me in the least. I had come to accept the fact that someday, sooner or later, I’d be involved in a murder. We were, I understood, brutal people. We hurt a lot of people. I wasn’t hanging around with Boy Scouts.
    The truth was that I genuinely liked Jimmy; to me, he was a great guy. We shared a lot of laughs and I always saw the good side of him. Sure, I’d seen his temper, but it had never been directed at me. The two of us worked well together. I had a reputation for fighting with my hands, so moving from boxing to bouncing to working for Jimmy was a natural progression for me. And it carried a lot of prestige. My father was pleased with my working for the top gangster in the city, someone most people in Southie respected for helping people in need, and used to say to me, “Listen and learn.” He would talk about me at family gatherings, telling more stories about me than any of his other five kids. It was as if I was doing what he wanted to do in life. When you consider the odds, it makes some sort of sense that out of his six kids one would turn out to be a criminal. It was the same thing in Jimmy’s family. He’d been a criminalsince he was a kid, the only one like that in the Bulger family. His brother Billy was president of the Massachusetts State Senate for sixteen years and later became president of the University of Massachusetts, while another brother, Jackie, was a clerk magistrate in the Boston Juvenile Court. His sisters were all housewives and professionals of one type or another.
    Until I got married and moved out of the house, when I came home at night and my clothes were bloody, from stabbing or fights or bouncing, my father wouldn’t ask me what happened. All he’d say was, “You all right?” and when I’d answer, “Yeah,” he’d say, “Give me your clothes,” and he’d throw them in the washing machine. He’d give them back to me when they were done and nothing else was said.
    I still kept all kinds of weapons in my parents’ house—pistols, silencers, machine guns with silencers, assault rifles, hand grenades. Over the years, Jimmy had acquired a lot of weaponry, and I had also picked up a lot from the streets. People who had stolen guns were always looking to sell them. Jimmy also traveled to New York to buy some. My weapons were locked in the foot locker in my bedroom. When I told my father I’d move them out of the house, he shook his head. “If the cops come here looking for them, I’ll say they belong to me,” he said. “What are they going to do to me? Put me in jail?”
    But seven years before that, there I was, sitting behind the wheel of Jimmy’s Delta 88 at the Mullins Club, staring at Jimmy in his Tow Truck and wig and mustache. This time, he told me to meet him down at Jimmy’s Harborside restaurant, and to be sure to back the car