Small Mercies

Later on, Bobby has dinner with Carmen, the woman he met at NA, and tells her about the case, wondering aloud why Jules disappeared. When Bobby mentions his own son, she asks if Bobby would do whatever it took to get revenge if someone were to hurt his son. On that topic, he recounts the series of tragedies that afflicted Mary Pat, including the death of her son and the disappearance of her first husband, and wonders if she has anything to live for if Jules is in fact dead. After dinner, Carmen talks about her experience working at a shelter for abused women and admits to using drugs to numb the pain of seeing so much suffering. Now she has faith in humanity, which Bobby tells her is a bad bet. He doesn’t go upstairs to Carmen’s apartment, choosing instead to let their relationship build slowly. When Bobby returns home, he returns a call from Pritchard and learns that Rum came to the station, bloody and battered, promising to explain what happened to Auggie if they would only protect him from Mary Pat.

The narrative shifts to earlier that evening, with Mary Pat covertly watching Rum at the loading docks, smoking marijuana with a friend. When the friend leaves, Rum’s car will not start, because Mary Pat poured brown sugar into his gas tank. Rum walks to a phone booth, but Mary Pat hits him with her car, drags him to a shuttered restaurant, pulls down his pants, and holds a box cutter to his genitals. He tells her everything, including the fact that Jules is dead, and she tells him that unless he gives the police the same account, she will give him a gruesome death. As she walks out, something about Jules’s involvement in Auggie’s death undermines her belief that Jules was fundamentally a better person than she is, and she blames herself.

At the station, Bobby receives a call from a federal agent who asks why he is looking into Butler, ostensibly trying to avoid any interference in their parallel investigations. The agent asks for priority, but Bobby brushes him off with promises to resolve the issue later. He and Pritchard interrogate Rum, who is badly hurt and terrified. He tells the detectives that he and the other three teenagers were in Columbia Park, drinking and smoking. When Auggie drove by in his sputtering car, George Dunbar taunted him as he passed out of sight. Jules had become pregnant by Frank Toomey, and she called him to demand that he pay for the child. The conversation left her distraught, and when Auggie unexpectedly emerged to ask if she was all right, Jules and Brenda immediately assumed that he was trying to mug them. When George and Rum confronted Auggie, he backs off, but then Jules started screaming at him, assuming that he was invading their neighborhood because busing made him think he could go anywhere.

Rum relates that George chased Auggie into the subway station, the others following and throwing beer bottles. On the platform, Jules kicked Auggie and the others followed suit. Rum eventually admits that Auggie ran into the side of a train and fell down, semiconscious and convulsing. When the four teenagers fled the scene, Frank was waiting for them, and Jules got into his car. At this point, the detectives sense that something is missing from Rum’s story, as Auggie was found under the train, not on the platform. After being pressured, Rum admits that Frank ordered them back into the station to kill Auggie.

The interrogation continues. Rum confesses that he and George Dunbar rolled Auggie onto the tracks, but that Auggie wasn’t dead. They all went down onto the tracks with Auggie, and someone beat him with a rock until he died. The detectives immediately arrest Rum for murder, and Rum is in disbelief at the realization that he will actually suffer consequences for the death of a young Black man.

After surveilling George Dunbar’s main dealers, Mary Pat follows one of them, Quentin Corkery, into a housing project. He enters a building and leaves shortly thereafter, and Mary Pat uses Dukie’s old burglary kit to break in. She finds a handgun with ammunition and a stash of narcotics, and takes everything. Within a few hours, the dealers discover the missing supply, and George comes to investigate and yell at his underlings.

She follows George when he leaves, and he arrives at his mother’s house. Mary Pat parks out of sight and eventually goes to sleep. She awakens to see George and Brian Shea pulling a boat onto the nearby shore. Brian hands George a duffel bag and orders him to get immediate results, then leaves in the boat. Mary Pat follows George into Roxbury, a completely unfamiliar and frightening environment for her. She loses track of George but remembers something that Brian had said and turns onto Moreland Avenue, finding his car next to a white van. To her shock, George is with a group of Black men, handing them rifles.

Mary Pat follows George back into Southie, where he returns the duffel bag to Shea in a garage and goes back to his mother’s house. Mary Pat returns to the same garage and is able to pick the lock. She finds a large stash of drugs, indicating that George was not merely dealing on his own, but working for Brian and, by extension, for Marty Butler. She realizes that Marty Butler has killed her entire family—making her first husband disappear, providing Noel with drugs, and now killing Jules. She quietly vows vengeance. Hours later, George comes to the garage and vomits when he realizes that the stash of drugs is missing.

Mary Pat pulls her gun on him, but George offers to let her go if he returns the drugs. Mary Pat counters that if he doesn’t get the drugs back, Butler will kill him. She offers to fight him hand-to-hand, but George wants to negotiate. Instead, Mary Pat strikes him with the gun and forces him to take a dose of his own heroin, which he had never done. He shoots up, and based on her experience with Noel, she assumes that she has a 10-minute window in which he will be vulnerable. He begins talking about cement mixing and his family’s business, and eventually reveals that Frank Toomey and Marty Butler buried Jules’s body beneath a slab of concrete in Marty’s house.

Reeling from the news, Mary Pat realizes that Brian Shea, whom she had known for decades and who just accused her of being a bad neighbor, was actually complicit in Jules’s murder. She drives George downtown and learns that Jules threatened to reveal Frank’s paternity if he refused to pay her support money for the child. They buried Jules beneath the house in order to evade surveillance by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which they know about from a contact in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Mary Pat drives George to the replica of the ship from the Boston Tea Party and tells him that like the Sons of Liberty once dumped tea, she dumped all his drugs into Boston Harbor. She handcuffs him to the steering wheel as he begs for help for he knows that the loss of the drugs will spell his death. Mary Pat leaves him there and calls Detective Bobby Coyne to tell him where to find George.