Every Hidden Thing

by Ted Flanagan

Genres: Political Thrillers; Suspense; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

The last scion of a once-powerful political family, Worcester mayor John O'Toole has his sights set on vastly higher aspirations. When night shift paramedic Thomas Archer uncovers a secret that could upend the mayor's career, O'Toole is set on silencing him and sends Eamon Conroy, a brutal former cop, to ensure the truth remains under wraps. But O'Toole doesn't stop there. With bribes, buried secrets, and personal attacks, he wreaks havoc on Archer's life in an attempt to save himself. Archer's troubles continue to mount when domestic terrorist and militia member Gerald Knak, who blames Archer for his wife's recent death, sets in motion a deadly plan for revenge. With two forces of evil aligned against him, Archer doesn't stand a chance. But things aren't always what they seem—and he may just have a few tricks up his sleeve in a last gambit to get out alive.

Release date: October 12, 2021

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

 

CHAPTER1

THE BABY CAME on one of those January nights in the city. Warm. Everyone in shirtsleeves. A gap between inevitable blizzards. Cars crept along damp streets shrouded in snow-fog. Black-crusted drifts bounded roads warped by frost heaves, ice forming beneath the asphalt and buckling it, melted water dribbling along underground fissures to a canal dug by Irish laborers two centuries ago.

They were angry men with alien accents. In old photos they had huddled in tents and lean-tos on the muddy hills ringing Worcester while they dug the Blackstone, like an army laying siege. The canal was forever their proudest feat, but it was narrow and when the trains connected Worcester to Providence and onward to a wider world that couldn’t care less, they abandoned the canal.

The city buried the thing in the 1970s as part of urban renewal, which had no place in its heart for a waterway that reminded them of the ways progress had failed them. Below the asphalt streets and brick factories built over it, below the city that rose and fell, over and over, the canal flowed onward. Out of sight.

Thomas Archer rode in the passenger seat of the ambulance with the window down, his uniform sleeves rolled to the elbows. He enjoyed the interlude. The night had been slow. He and Julio Tavares, his partner, had done a handful of calls, nothing that required more than a smile and a taxi ride for a few of the regulars.

Even that felt like a gift.

The holidays had started almost two months ago with a cardiac arrest under a Christmas tree, the dead man’s children begging for their father’s life even as Archer and Julio knew they’d lost the battle before the first chest compression. Plenty of mayhem since. Two fatal fires. A murder-suicide up on Trenton Street on New Year’s Day, and two nights ago Archer had pulled city boxing champ Leon “Sunny” Matos from a Corolla the pugilist had driven into a brick wall at eighty miles an hour.

Tonight, though. A breeze. Easy living. They’d eaten dinner slowly enough to taste it, sat at their favorite booth at the Bully, then driven down the hill and flirted with some nurses at University. The cops over at the Bean Machine on Highland were still chuckling about Mickey P, the night shift supervisor, who’d had to let a certain state rep out of a certain cemetery into which he’d—again—locked himself by accident, with a woman, though not his wife. Archer had roared with laughter, thinking there were no better storytellers in the world than Worcester cops, and around midnight began to contemplate the word. The Q word. Maybe tonight, he thought. Maybe tonight would be quiet.

Then, Kansas Street, down by the rail yard, three AM and a call for the ambulance. Woman in labor.

When he listened to the dispatch recordings later, Archer heard a frantic man on the 911 line, whispering, straining notto be heard. The baby was here, he said. Months of poor planning, no planning, all coming to a head, and now here’s the baby. He said it was limp and gray and soaking the mattress. He said someone had tried delivering the baby at home.

Archer found them, baby and mother, on a mattress on the floor of a third-story bedroom. Train engines and railcars colliding night after night outside the building shook dust and bits of plaster from the walls onto the floor, so the mattress floated on a sea of talcum scrapes. Lath peeked out in places from hundred-year-old patches of broken and gray horsehair plaster, polka-dotted by black blooms of mold.

The woman, cross-legged and hunched over on the mattress, blew air through pursed lips. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her mocha-colored skin glistened. Pupils pinpoint. She grimaced and chased her breath. Blood and water soaked the mattress, and the baby was still and silent. For a moment Archer saw her as on an altar, the baby a sacrifice.

A man stood to the left of the mattress with his arms clasped behind his back and his eyes wide as he stared into a back corner of the room, not at the baby, not at the woman. He seemed as black as night, and when Archer looked at the man for an extra moment, he thought part of him melted into the back wall, where the light from the bulb faded into shadow.

Julio dropped to a knee at the foot of the mattress, touched the baby’s stomach, held his fingertips over the baby’s mouth, then against the inside of a bicep.

“Shit,” Julio said, then placed an oxygen mask and squeezed air into its lungs. Someone had already clamped and cut the umbilical cord, Archer saw. The placenta lay in a glass baking dish on the floor. Blood trailed in a long tendril from rumpled bedsheets to the dish.

Archer felt the pulse in the woman’s wrist banging away, a weak and thready metronome.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.

She nodded. “I work for the city,” she said, her voice thick and dreamy.

She panted. The bottoms of the sweat beads on her forehead glimmered beneath the weak yellow light from the bulb above, small planets orbiting in the furrows of her brow. The man to her left unclasped his hands and stepped forward to thrust a stack of papers at Archer.

He scanned.

Hospital discharge instructions.

Yesterday morning.

Daisy Fontana, thirty-six weeks gestation, evaluated for eclampsia, gestational diabetes.

Past history included psych issues, heroin abuse, and asthma. Typical for the city.

“You don’t need that,” a man behind Archer said.

Archer’s stomach seized and his heart jackhammered, like a sprinter’s at the end of a hundred-yard dash. He wondered for a moment if you could imagine a voice, because the one behind him couldn’t be in the room. The voice he thought he’d heard should still be in a jail somewhere, not here, not now.

Where are the police? Archer thought.

“The paperwork,” the man said. “It’s not pertinent.”

Archer turned to the man. He was dressed in a black suit and chewing the inside of his hollow, pockmarked cheek beneath a wispy comb-over of almost-white blond hair. The shadows under his boxer’s nose deepened as he pressed into the ring of pale light. It was a face Archer wasn’t supposed to see for another decade. Eamon Conroy, a murderer, though sent to jail for obstruction and not the crime he’d really committed.

Archer grimaced at his own complacency. He’d forgotten the paramedic’s reflex: never go into a room you can’t get out of.

“This is under control,” Conroy said. He pointed to the man standing by Daisy’s bed. “Rigo here just panicked. There was supposed to be a midwife.”

“Midwife?” Archer asked.

“Ms. Fontana here wanted to take advantage of a natural childbirth,” Conroy said. “When Rigo panicked, she was understandably shaken. But everything’s fine.”

“We’re supposed to be at Memorial,” Rigo hissed. “No fucking midwife.”

Conroy held his hands up in surrender. “I told you we were handling this, Rigo,” he said. “I thought I was clear about discretion. You know we’ll take care of this.”

To Archer, the man’s eyes were holes in the light, reflecting nothing. He knew one bedrock piece of truth about Eamon Conroy. There were two types of dangerous: the claimed and the authentic. Conroy was as authentic as they came.

“We should have gone to the hospital,” Rigo whispered.

“The baby came too fast,” Conroy said. “I’ve explained that to you. Maybe if she laid off that other stuff, we could have gone a few more weeks.”

Archer turned back to the woman. He didn’t want to look at Conroy. He didn’t want to think about Conroy. About the fact that Conroy was back. About what that meant.

“When did the baby come?” Archer asked. He spoke to Rigo.

“The baby’s fine,” Conroy said. “He’s just taking a nap.”

“The baby’s not fine,” Archer said. “You did this, didn’t you?”

“I got here after you did,” Conroy said. “That’s the story I’m sticking to, anyway. That’s the one everyone here who’s smart will tell.”

The woman pursed her lips. Her eyes shifted to Conroy. Archer looked down and to the left, saw Conroy’s shirt cuffs stained pink where they poked out from his coat.

“The heart rate is coming up,” Julio said. “He’s still not breathing well.”

“Earlier,” Rigo said. “The baby came earlier.”

Archer looked at the blood, the water, the limp baby on the bed. He saw brown dots on Conroy’s forehead.

“What did you do?” Archer asked.

No reply.

“Police coming?” Archer asked Julio.

“I heard the sector car sign on,” Julio said.

“I canceled the police,” Conroy said. He waved a cell phone and smiled at Archer. “The police have better things to do with their time than go on medicals. No one here but us mice.”

“We should get moving,” Julio said. Archer nodded. Conroy clasped Archer’s left shoulder, turned him around slowly, and held out a hand. His suit jacket parted open, and Archer saw the dark metal glint of a pistol in the light-brown leather holster under Conroy’s left arm.

“I’ll need those papers,” Conroy said. “Then I’ll be out of here.”

The woman screamed and bent over double in the bed. Rigo shook his head and stared at a point on the floor in front of him. Julio slid the bags of equipment closer to him with his foot. Archer stared at Conroy, made up his mind. He reached behind him for the heavy black flashlight hanging from the loop on his right hip. He held it over his head, a hatchet ready to strike.

“You know we’re taking the baby,” Archer said. “And mom. And the papers. Even you know we have to. You can’t keep people away from this. It’s us or someone else. Whatever you were trying to do here, it’s too late.”

Conroy smiled. He flicked the fingers of his outstretched hand.

“I have that same flashlight,” he said. “Not cheap. I didn’t think you guys made that kind of scratch. Must be good at figuring things out. You must be a genius.”

“I’m pretty stupid,” Archer said. His stomach clenched, and he tasted the fear that rose on a wave of acid rising in his throat.

“Eamon, you know what happens if things go bad with the baby,” Julio said. “You haven’t been off the job that long. The state will turn this place upside down. No one can stop that, once it gets going. So far, there’s wiggle room. We can be flexible. Who was here, who wasn’t here, what the hell was going on. All of it. We can be motherhumping Gumby at the moment. But we need to go to keep things that way. We’ve got to slide, man. Time to fly.”

Conroy considered what Julio said, then shrugged nd stepped back.

“There’ll be plenty of time to sort this out later,” he said, then pointed a finger at Rigo. “Remember what we talked about. Discretion. Tell the right story.”

Conroy straightened his coat, picked a piece of lint off his tie, then walked into the kitchen and out of sight. Julio exhaled. Archer bowed his head and took a deep breath.

“You know that psycho got out of jail?” Julio asked. “Seems like someone should have told us that bit of information.”

Archer shrugged. “I had no idea.” He looked at the hospital paperwork, then bent down to the woman.

“We’re going to the hospital now, Daisy,” he said. “Your baby is doing better but is still very sick. Do you understand?”

Daisy nodded.

“Can I go too?” Rigo asked.

“Who called 911?” Archer asked.

“I did,” Rigo said.

“That guy try to stop you?”

Rigo nodded.

“There was no midwife, was there?” Archer asked.

Rigo shook his head. “They said there would be. This whole thing is fu—”

“Rigo, no,” Daisy said between pants.

Rigo shook his head, a pitcher shaking off a sign.

On the way to the hospital, Archer watched as the baby’s color and breathing improved, but it was quiet, listless. A bad sign, Archer knew. A kind of surrender. The silence muted any joy Daisy might have felt, he thought, though he sensed there wasn’t much of that here in this corner of the city to begin with. He looked up front, saw Rigo absently eating his bag lunch.

They passed the Pigtown Deli on Shaw Street. The accountant in the office above the place found fat returns for the city’s cops and firefighters and medics. The deli itself was a front for a Vietnamese religious sect that recruited takeout customers while they waited with a continuous-loop video of doves floating on sun-dappled skies. The bagels and vegan soups were good enough that Archer thought it was a fair price to pay.

The baby remained quiet, even when Archer flicked the soles of its feet. Daisy only winced when Archer started the intravenous line. She stared into the baby’s face with a look Archer couldn’t interpret. Was it happiness? Was it love? Was it pain?

---

Archer tried to write the two charts—one for Daisy, the other for the baby. He started and stopped. His mind wandered. Seeing Conroy again had brought it all back.

Freeland Street, Archer just a couple years on the job. A single-unit efficiency on the fifth floor of a graffiti-covered box of an apartment complex, not a thing in it except a round table and a refrigerator in the kitchen. The living room had a large television, no furniture. Archer’s partner at the time, an ancient medic named Arnold Moonandowski—Moonie—recognized it for what it was.

“Safe house,” he said, while they waited in the kitchen.

“Safe from who?” Archer asked.

“Place where the cops can talk to people without having to take them into cruisers, or for people who can’t be seen keeping appointments at the police station,” Moonie said. He whispered. It was the first time Archer had seen his veteran partner spooked. The door to a bedroom at the end of a short hall off the kitchen was closed, but they could see a yellow strip of light below it, shadows of feet passing back and forth.

And they didn’t know much. Dispatch had given them the address, said they were going for a sick person. No other details. When they’d knocked, a plainclothes cop opened it. He was coatless, sleeves rolled up, his badge pinned to a strap on his shoulder holster.

“You fellas mind giving us a moment?” he said.

“You need us to leave, Eamon?” Moonie asked. Archer was surprised Moonie knew the cop by name. Worried because the ever-affable Moonie had gone all stiff and businesslike.

“Nothing like that—it’s just some of the men in here need to leave, but we can’t have people seeing their faces. Secret Squirrel shit, but if you could indulge us and just turn around, that would be great.”

Archer looked at Moonie, and Moonie pointed toward the refrigerator, and a small group of people hustled out the door behind them. Archer heard male voices speaking Spanish in short bursts. He sneaked a sideways glance at the four men passing behind him. They were older. He thought he recognized two of them—one of them drove for Blue Cab; the other owned a bodega on Woodland. There was something about them, an air, a presence. The cab driver caught Archer’s eye. Archer wanted to get out of the apartment, as far from these men as possible.

“We have a situation,” Conroy said, once they were alone. “I can trust you guys here a bit, right? We got this guy in the back room, a real lowlife, scumball piece of shit. Drug dealer. Diddler. Real shitbag. So, we’re interviewing him, and he wasn’t being cooperative. Hell, what he was being was downright uncooperative.”

Moonie and Archer nodded their heads as if they knew exactly what Conroy was driving at.

“And the hell of it is, I think we may have hurt him, and I’m not sure what to do about it,” Conroy said. “So one of the guys says, hey, let’s call an ambulance. Now, generally, I hate to bother you guys with every little ache and pain suffered by our clientele, but here’s the thing with this guy.” Conroy leaned in, gathered Moonie and Archer in his arms, pulled them close, huddling, like they were a football team ready to make the big score. “The thing of it is, I’m not sure he’s still breathing.”

They found him hanging sideways from a metal chair in the middle of the room. Young. Twenties maybe. Maybe younger. Shirtless, connected to the chair by handcuffs. A puddle of water under the chair. And piss. A two-foot piece of garden hose on the ground nearby, its ends covered in dried blood. Even from across the room, Archer could see the man was motionless, his chest eerily still, the absence of rise and fall more noticeable than if he still breathed. His eyes were swollen shut. His chest a canvas of abrasions and scrapes and angry red stripes.

Moonie reacted first, ordered Conroy to undo the handcuffs. They laid the man on the floor and went to work. Archer noticed Conroy scouring the room, dumping tools and the hose and a small scale into a duffel bag, then wiping down the counter and a table with a towel before peeking over Moonie’s shoulder to check out their work, then wordlessly striding out of the apartment and into the night.

Later, they sat on the boat ramp across from the hospital and ate subs from the Portuguese takeout place. Archer tried not to think of their patient, now in the morgue at University.

“What was that?” Archer finally asked.

“What that was, was stuff you’ll need to learn not to ask about,” Moonie said.

“That cop, you know him?”

Moonie nodded. “Guy named Conroy,” he said. “Scary dude. I know we spend a lot of time telling the new guys how close we are to the police, and it’s true. The cops in this city, we do anything for them. They’ll always be there for you. But Conroy? He’s an exception. Other cops keep their distance. He’s psycho. I watched him once smack around a pregnant junkie at the New Star shelter because she called him dickless.”

“Did you report him?”

Moonie finished his sandwich, rolled the wax paper into a ball and tossed it into a nearby trash can. The city darkened as the sun dropped beneath the surrounding hills. Streetlights on the river bridge winked to life.

“That’s not how this works,” Moonie said. “The cops will take care of their own. Everyone knows the score on Conroy.”

“What was that apartment?” Archer asked.

“Safe house. Not everyone can be seen talking to the cops, so they’ll bring them to one of those apartments and talk to them in private.”

“That guy was no informant,” Archer said. “I mean, they electrocuted his balls. They killed him. We need to tell—”

“You don’t need to tell anyone anything,” Moonie said. “Conroy is … entrepreneurial. He runs his own crew. Off the books. They’ll get him. People know what he’s up to. But it’s not your job. Do yourself a favor, just keep your head down and stay out of it.”

---

Archer finished the charts, dropped copies off with Daisy’s nurse. Her baby was upstairs in the neonatal intensive care unit. He peeked in the exam room where Daisy slept, fluid going into one arm, a unit of blood into the other. Rigo nowhere to be seen.

He thought of Eamon Conroy, how he hadn’t taken Moonie’s advice back when. For Conroy’s fellow cops, the Freeland Street thing was the last straw. They had bitten their lips for years, turned a blind eye to his methods, but killing a man, torturing him beforehand? No one had signed up for that. When detectives came asking, Archer gave it up. All of it.

Later, when he’d finished testifying at the trial, Conroy winked at Archer as he left the stand. They sent Conroy off to jail, and Archer moved on, never expected to see the man again.

Now tonight—Conroy. Materializing in the middle of whatever this was, a bad dream returned and alive in the middle of a dark room coated in plaster dust.

Daisy stirred, opened her eyes, and saw Archer standing by the curtain. A thought came to him, as if hitting a trip wire. The moment before the explosion but after it was too late. Daisy slowly shook her head. I’m in the way, he realized. I’m in the way of a dangerous man.

 

 

CHAPTER2

LU MCCARTHY GOT the call right after Valentine’s Day. Kittredge was chummy and warm, which the boss never was unless he wanted something. Come to my office, he said. We should talk. She’d evaded, but only for so long. She knew something was coming, didn’t like the way her boss refused to reveal the agenda.

“There’s just some stuff we need to go over,” Kittredge had said.

Navigating the maze of forgotten hallways in this windowless backwater section of the sprawling newspaper building, its plate metal walls sweating from the little steam heat the structure’s ancient boilers eked out against the winter cold, Lu imagined which Kittredge she’d face. Her boss had adopted many iterations over the years, a chameleon whose spots always changed in ways designed to keep Kittredge rising, ever upward—although, as it turned out, those spots could get him only to middle management at a midsize daily that had become a grape, dying on the vine.

There was backslapping Gabe Kittredge, your buddy, the guy who always bought the last round when they shut down the Dinger on election night. This was the Old Kittredge, Lu’s bureau mate back in the days when they’d shared two desks in a strip mall office in Emporia, covered dog catcher meetings and school visits by state reps who were feted and greeted like royalty.