Aidan doesn't know whether to be offended or not, but as usual, he laughs it off.
“Actually,” I continue, “if you wanted to see Brother Frank, Marco and I are heading to the hospital this afternoon to see him. You could come along, if you love him so much.”
“I'd like that,” Aidan agrees with a soft smile.
“You understand,” I warn him, “he's a Family man as well. Is it breaking any of your weird-ass moral codes to go see him?”
“Lately I begin to understand that the line between good and evil is not…as clear cut as I thought.”
It's as close an admission of shades of gray as I'm ever gonna get from Priest Boy. I glance over my shoulder at Marco. “You cool with that?”
He gives me a nod, surprised. Normally I don’t talk much to Marco when we’re out, treating him like a nonentity. That’s a dick move that I never would have pulled before my marriage, a bad habit I’ve fallen into partly because Marco is so good at making himself invisible in my life.
But my mother raised me better than that.
I nod back at Marco in thanks. “Then let’s get out of here.”
* * *
Once Priest Boyand I are buckled up in the backseat and Marco is ignoring us in favor of talk radio, I flick the knuckle of Aidan’s little finger, hard, to get his attention.
“Ow!”
“Shh. Listen. I need to ask you something.”
“What is it?” he asks, lowering his voice to my own volume.
“That uncle of yours, Jim O’Leary. My old bodyguard. The one who ratted me out.” I hesitate, wondering exactly how to put this. “What exactly happened to him?”
Aidan frowns, dark eyes serious. “Why are you asking this, Finch?”
“Just tell me what you know about his death.”
He shakes his head, but it’s not because he’s saying no. “I don’t know anything. I wasn’t even at the funeral. I know rumors and stories, that’s all.”
“And?” I prompt. Aidan sends a glance to Marco. “Look, you’re not gonna get in trouble for telling me.”
“All I know is, they were pulling parts of him out of the harbor for weeks. And…it wasn’t a quick death. That’sallI know.”
“But word on the street was that the Donovans did it?”
“Well,” Aidan says, and hesitates. “Your father had his reasons, didn’t he? Jim O’Leary betrayed his only son.”
I nod and sit back, and Aidan goes back to staring out the window.
The thing is, I can’t quite believe it of my Pops.
Maggie, sure. She’d order a hit without taking a breath. But she had no reason to punish Jim O’Leary. On the contrary, she would’vethankedhim. I was supposed to end up dead that day, and it was only luck and fate—kismet, I think, with a small smile—that meant I didn’t.
Besides, my Pops had already moved the Donovan family into new streams of business,awayfrom crime. And it’s not like he’d had much love for me at the time, either. Would Howard Donovan really have ordered the brutal murder of my old bodyguard?
A clean hit, maybe. But torture and dismemberment? That just wasn’t the Donovan style, even when weweredirty.
I still don’t know what any of this means, but later on I’ll tell Luca, see what he thinks. Maybe we can figure it out together.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Finch
