by Chuck Hogan
She unfolded her arms to go into her bag, bringing out a cigarette and a butane lighter. Danielle only smoked when she drank.
Maven stayed to her left, out of the smoke stream, ears still ringing from the club.
“He is the control freak of all control freaks.” She made a wild gesture with her cigarette before pointing it at Maven. “You want to drive a girl crazy, Gridley? Insist on only tantric sex.”
Maven’s face widened. Too much information.
“And then—” She smoked. “And then there are these tenants of his. The four fucking Musketeers living below us. Running around at his beck and call … doing God knows what. I mean, what am I here, a kept woman?”
“A very well-kept woman.”
She glared back at him, and Maven realized maybe “a kept woman” wasn’t a compliment after all.
“I work for what I have,” she said. “Believe me—believe me.”
She was smoking the hell out of that Camel. It was almost gone.
“Boston,” she said, looking at the buildings overhead, enunciating it like a curse. She turned into an open-air parking lot—and Maven stopped.
She realized he was no longer with her and turned.
“Huh,” she said, flicking her cigarette away after one last puff, talking smoke. “You haven’t been back here?”
Maven stood in his old parking lot. He looked at the cars, and up at the familiar buildings. The acoustics of the lot came back to him, the cars rolling by, the nightlife blaring one street over.
Nothing had changed. Except him.
He looked to the gate booth and saw a new guard sitting on a stool inside, arms crossed, headset buds in his ears.
Danielle tapped her foot. “You are drunk, aren’t you.”
Maven followed her to a black Range Rover with twin chrome exhaust pipes. Inside, he settled into a seat fleshed in white leather with smooth black pores.
How far he had come was obvious: from the guy checking cars to the guy riding in the Range Rover with Danielle Vetti. More startling to him was how staggeringly fast it had all happened.
He felt elated suddenly and turned to share a revelation with Danielle. “Do you know that life is just a dream?”
She handed him the car keys. “Could have fucking fooled me.”
He started up the Rover, the heat vents coming on, and she immediately went to work on the radio.
Maven backed out and rolled to the gate, the attendant stepping out of the booth in jeans, work boots, and an olive-drab field jacket. Hard to tell if the army coat was just warm and fashionable or really his. He raised the gate arm, watching them pull through. Maven checked the guy’s face, imagining a moment of solidarity between two guys on opposite ends of the spectrum. But the guard never even looked at Maven. He was too busy trying to sneak a look down Danielle’s dress.
Maven pulled away, revving the engine a bit, actually pissed. Danielle squirmed in her seat like someone trying to get comfortable in bed. “Let’s not go back yet. What do you say? The night’s not over yet. Let’s drive around a little.”
Maven looked over, her perfect bare knees twinned beneath the dash, her chest swelling against the confines of her dress. At a red light before Tremont Street, he turned and reached across her, past her shoulder, grasping the seat belt there and drawing the strap down across her body, clasping it between the seats. She laughed at his attending to her, then the light turned green and he drove on.
He took them north under the sails of the Zakim Bridge, starting to feel good again. The luxury vehicle at his command, his just right blood-alcohol mix, slinky music on the radio. He didn’t mind playing chauffeur because he was with her, she was feeling loose, and for once they were alone.
“So what’s with this headache?” she said.
“Nothing. Gone now.”
“Really? Been kind of a mope lately.”
“I—what?”
“A mope. A drip. A bummer.”
“Look who’s saying this to me.”
“Where were you Musketeers all last week?”
“We were … away.”
“Cape Cod.” Maven looked at her, and she smiled. “Brad said so, on the phone to Termino.”
“So?”
“Do anything fun?”
“Not really.”
“Little early for beach weather. You guys go antiquing?”
“A little.”
“Catch up on your reading?”
“Exactly. Caught up on all my reading.”
“See? Sourpuss. What’s the matter, poor baby? Has it been a while? I find that hard to believe.”
She slipped her left hand over his thigh, faking a grab for his crotch. He kicked up and swerved the Rover, not a good maneuver at seventy miles an hour.
She pulled her hand back, laughing. “The look on your face.”
Did she do these things to be funny or provocative? “I’m just saying—don’t reach down there unless you mean it.”
“Oh? You want me to mean it?”
“I’m just saying.”
He didn’t need to look over to know that she enjoyed her effect on him. She turned up the radio and went fishing inside her clutch for another cigarette. “Hey, Gridley.” She held something toward him. “Gridley,” she said again. “What do you say?”
“I don’t smoke,” he said, still not looking.
“I know that.” She pulled it back, holding her hand to her nose as though fighting off a sneeze. “I’m asking if you want to hit up.”
Maven turned and saw the silver-capped amber vial in her hand. “What the fuck is that?”
“Artificial sweetener.”
“Are you fucking offering me blow?”
“Oka-ay. I guess that’s a no.”
She hadn’t been fighting off a sneeze. She had been snorting a bump off the webbing between her thumb and forefinger.
Maven caught her wrist as she was pulling back the vial. “Who gave this to you?”
“Christ, Gridley, relax. Eyes on the road.”
He shook her wrist. “What are you doing with this?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing with this? What’s the big fucking—”
“The big deal?” He was incredulous. “The big deal?”
“Mother of Christ, all right, already.”
“What about Royce?”
“Royce?” She swung her head around to look. “Gee, I don’t know. Is he here now?”
“You know he—”
“I didn’t ask him if he wanted a bump, I asked you. Which was a big mistake, I can see that now.” She pulled back but he did not release her. “Christ! Always so concerned about him. It’s unmanly. You forget that I’m not his employee. Now will you fucking let go of my wrist, pretty please?”
He shook it again. “Who gave it to you?”
“You don’t understand, Gridley. People don’t give it to you. You have to buy it.”
“Someone at the club?”
She was glaring at him, and finally he released her wrist. She pulled back angrily and dumped the vial into her clutch and dropped her bag to the floor. “Fine.” She leaned an elbow against the window. “Just drive then.”
He was going to cut off at the next exit and take her back home, but when the sign came up, he changed his mind, staying on the highway. Because fuck her.
“The way you four tiptoe around him,” she said. “Genuflecting. So desperate for somebody to lead you, to tell you how to think and what to do. Like a cult. You’re all brainwashed, fucking stars in your eyes. And so secretive. What a joke. Do you really think I don’t know what you were doing out there on Cape Cod all week? Do you really think I don’t know?”
She couldn’t know. She was guessing. She was close enough to Royce to figure some of it out if she cared—though she had never seemed to care before.
“Then again,” she said, “maybe he’s not exactly who he appears to be either.”
Maven drove on, saying nothing, not taking the bait.
“‘Realtors.’ That’s a good one. What’s ‘real’ about any of you?”
“You want me to take you home? Will that make you stop talking?”
“Home.” She huffed a laugh. “Home to your boss, you mean. Your master.”
She was high, and it was getting ugly, and being alone with her no longer seemed like a good idea. Maven decided to come back to the city on Route 1, giving her time to settle down while returning her to Marlborough Street before Precipice closed.
She rolled down her window after a while and turned up the music, singing along quietly with some of it, her arm outside the window, coasting on the current. Wind roared through the Range Rover, the stereo music like a jukebox playing inside a tornado. At one point he looked over and she was wiping her face, either pushing hair out of her eyes, or maybe crying.
Eventually she put up the window, but remained angled toward her door, watching the night go past. Maven eyed her shoulder beneath the thin strap of her dress, and the underside of her thigh below the slanted hem of her dress—until he realized she could probably see his reflection in the window. He settled back to drive the rest of the way in silence, and a memory returned to him.
Freshman year of high school, the parents of his pot-smoking buddy, Scotty, took them out to J. C. Hillary’s in Dedham one night. This was out of character for Scotty’s not-interested, never-around parents, and Maven and Scotty were both pretty well baked at the time, two little shits gorging on dinner rolls and giggling at silverware, trying to play it cool while the adults drank manhattans. The sedate, mid-to-upscale restaurant had Maven on sensory overload, compulsively taking little birdlike sips of water to keep from freaking out—but at one point he noticed a girl returning from the ladies’ room. After a few confirming blinks, he accepted that it was indeed Danielle Vetti, the Danielle Vetti, right there in the restaurant with him. She wore a knee-length skirt and a tight, cherry-red top, and he tracked her to a nearby table where she sat down with her family.
Another girl sat at the Vettis’ table, her back to Maven, a pair of crutches stood up against her chair. Not the sprained-ankle kind with the padded underarm bars, but the forearm collar, cerebral-palsy-type walking sticks, the sight of which sobered him. Maven never saw her face—the face of Danielle Vetti’s younger sister—nor that of her mother, who sat next to the girl, occasionally reaching over to swipe a cloth napkin across the girl’s mouth.
The hottest girl in high school had a handicapped sister. This discovery made a profound impact on him. Looking at Danielle Vetti pushing food around her plate, the rest of her family eating in silence, brought her down to earth for him. She was no more attainable, but at least understandable. She was real.
His school-shooter fantasies changed soon after that. He wasn’t the shooter anymore; he was the hero kid who jumped the shooter and knocked him out, saving Danielle Vetti. The one girl in school who secretly understood him.
She captured a song on the satellite radio and played it over and over again, Duran Duran’s moody and liquid “Come Undone.” As they neared the city, the overnight mist caught the ambient light and created a tangerine aura, a glowing shell of moisture over the city, dawn still hours away.
“He likes you, you know.” She said this so quietly, still looking out the window, that he wasn’t sure she was talking to him at first. “He talks about you, more than the others.”
Maven nodded, pleased, but didn’t let on.
She sat forward and turned down the radio. “Maybe I am a kept woman. Everybody pays one way or another. Just look at you.”
“What about me?”
“Come on, Gridley. You don’t think you’re a kept man?”
MAVEN SAT ALONE INSIDE THE MARLBOROUGH STREET PAD, THINKing about what Danielle had said. He realized that the bed he was sitting on, the tumbler of water in his hand, the Back Bay address—none of it was his.
What was he exactly? Royce’s employee, or his partner? His muscle, or his friend?
Maven shook it off. The best way to kill a good thing was to question it to death. Bottom line, the day he met Brad Royce was the luckiest day of his life.
He looked up at the ceiling, hearing her footsteps cross the floor upstairs. When he let her off at the door before going around to the alley to park the car, she had said to him:
“You’re a good soldier, Gridley.”
Then she reached over and held his cheek with her hand. A gesture of affection mixed with apology. He leaned into her soft palm, so slightly she could barely have noticed. It ended with her playfully pushing his face away.
He took it from her because he liked it, because he was all tangled up in a swirl of desire and concern. Even now, staring at the ceiling, he could still feel the touch of her hand upon his cheek.
THE ROUND TABLE
THEY KEPT THE RENTED VAN PARKED ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE smoke shop, moving it at least once daily. They took turns wandering inside the cramped shop to play a quiet hour of keno, so that they came to be seen as regulars around the Brockton neighborhood.
This was the grind work. Recon. Days of tedium leading up to ten minutes of action. “Eyes on the prize,” they reminded each other when patience wore thin, cooped up in the back of the hot van. They talked about the bikes they were going to buy themselves when this job went down.
Around three-thirty, two bikers pulled up outside the smoke shop on major-league Harleys, the chapter head of the Crossbone Champs motorcycle club and another full-patch member. Their colors—two white bones surrounded by a red circle, forming crosshairs over a small skull—were obscured under black ponchos due to the rain.
Bikers are easy to follow but notoriously tough to get close to. They are especially easy to follow when you know ahead of time where they’re going.
On the floor of the rear cargo area of the van, lined with sound-baffling furniture pads, they sat in gaming chairs. Instead of game controllers in their hands, they worked with five different mobile phones.
One was the work phone, labeled T for “talk,” with Termino at the other end. The ex-heavyweight was too well-known from his Brockton fighting days to be of any use here, so he was set up outside the Crossbone Champs clubhouse in Abington, one town over. They never brought personal phones on a job because the location was too easily traced.
Two Samsung phones labeled CL-1 and CL-2 were exact clones of the bikers’ own mobile phones, handy for checking voice mail and text messages, as well as accessing their contact lists. The chapter head’s clone held photos from bike week in Laconia, New Hampshire, grinning biker babes flashing tats and tits.
The phone labeled W was another work phone. The bikers’ phones had not only been cloned, but “ghosted” as well. A clone was an exact copy of the unit’s microchip, whereas a ghost modified a phone’s chipset with an embedded implant. When dialed from this W phone, the bikers’ phones answered without ringing or vibrating, automatically switching on its microphone. Any ambient conversations were then narrowcasted back to the W phone. No need to risk infiltrating the motorcycle club itself, which was a near impossibility anyway: bikers’ paranoia topped even drug dealers’ paranoia. Modern mobile-phone technology made anyone a potential walking wiretap.
The fifth phone was one of a separate pair of ghost phones, thin, high-end Razr models. These units they kept swapping in and out of the store, stashing them behind the lottery station next to the front counter like a dropped phone. They rotated them out twice a day because ghost phones burned through batteries. If not for this, they could have monitored their marks from the comfort of home, or even a beach two thousand miles away. But burning out the bikers’ batteries would raise red flags, so they had to coop out in the van to eyeball their marks so as to know when to call and listen.
The W phone was hooked up to a laptop, recording now. Transmission from the ghosts inside the bikers’ leather jackets were too muffled, but the keno plant eavesdropped clear. Three men, the two bikers and the store owner, a Crossbone prospect, w
ere discussing a shipment of “pellets,” code for ecstasy pills.
Royce had presented them with all this, the cloned phones, the ghosts, the bikers’ mobile numbers, along with photographs and RMV printouts. A bounty of inside information.
“How does he get this stuff ?” asked Maven.
They talked about Royce, talked about him a lot, especially on long surveillances, either speculating about his past or cracking on his legend—but tradecraft discussions were for some reason taboo.
“I heard him and Termino talking a couple of days ago,” said Glade, pulling one headphone away from his ear. “I think Royce owns a piece of a couple of Verizon store franchises.”
Suarez marveled. “The man is a genius.”
“Agreed,” said Maven. “But how does he get close enough to the marks to get their phones for cloning in the first place?”
The other two shook their heads, shrugging, the question beyond their pay grade.
“You know what I heard?” said Suarez. “I heard that Brad Royce lists his occupation on his tax return as ‘Brad Fucking Royce.’”
Glade smiled. Using Royce’s full name was the tip-off to the joke. “Yeah?” said Glade. “Know what I heard?”
Suarez said, “What?”
“I heard that the pope once found a potato chip? Looked exactly like Brad Royce.”
Maven said, “You know that statue, The Thinker, the guy sitting like this?” He put his chin on the back of his hand and got pensive. “That guy’s thinking about the size of Brad Royce’s cock.”
Some were old, some were new. Some Glade had stolen off the Internet. But it was enough to pass the afternoon in the back of the work van.
STARVING WHEN THEY GOT BACK INTO TOWN, MAVEN LANDED A LATE-day space down the block from J. J. Foley’s. He went to the bar to order them a couple of pops, and a guy in a patrol cap turned at his voice.
“Neal.”
Ricky. Maven was a few full seconds recognizing him. Not because he’d changed, but because it had been so long. The old cap was cocked over his dented head as usual, a long-sleeved henley covering his bad arm. Razor burn reddened his neck, his hair too long over his ears.
