by Chuck Hogan
Doreen touched her cheek with her long-nailed hand, finding it wet from Danielle’s tears. She wiped hard, nearly slapping herself, wanting the wetness off her.
The screen door slammed, and Maven realized that Danielle had left.
* * *
SHE HAD HIM PULL OVER IN FRONT OF BEANO’S PACKIE, UNDER AN arrow sign made up of flashing red, white, and blue bulbs. “You wanna get us a sixer?” she said.
“Look, Danny, you don’t want to—”
“Fine,” she said, throwing open the door and getting out. “Jesus.”
THEY LEFT THE MERCEDES IN AN OLD OFFICE PARK AND WALKED past large mounds of excavated earth left over from the office park’s construction decades before. Danielle led the way into the adjoining lot of undeveloped land, bordering the commuter rail tracks.
The Pits, as the area was known to Gridley teenagers, overlapped Gridley and neighboring Avon. Shared police jurisdiction—and being accessible only on foot—meant essentially no police jurisdiction, and so into this no-man’s-land came the party kids looking for a weekend place to drink and hang.
Danielle set down the bag of beer, pulling out a quart of Mount Gay rum. “Fuck, look at this wasteland.” The low areas were littered with cans, bottles, and rotting tires. “And this was it. This was the place. Our Club Precipice. This shithole.”
Maven pulled a Red Stripe out of the bag. She of course bought beer that required a bottle opener. Maven had been in a similar fix many times in Eden. He hooked one of his lower incisors under the serrated edge of the cap, biting down, using his teeth for an opener. He spit out the cap and drank half at a gulp.
“I have to see that again,” said Danielle.
He opened one for her.
“I’m gonna clip you on my key chain,” she said, turning and wandering, double-fisted, toward the unfenced tracks.
Maven drank again. Now he was her babysitter. He went to a big rock slathered with years of graffiti, that the kids used to call Painted Rock, and leaned against it, facing the tracks.
He had been here once in high school, taken by a friend who straddled the line between outcast and in-crowd. They took turns drinking one bottle of horribly sour white wine while nobody talked to them. After a while he and his friend went off exploring, thinking maybe they could spy into some bedroom windows from atop the high dunes. When they came back, some kid who was popular but not tough asked if they were gay, which got everyone laughing because it was so hilarious to pick on losers. So Maven went back along the paths to a dead raccoon they had seen, picking it up by its tail and coming back to drop it into the comedian’s lap while he sat talking to some girl. The kid totally lost his shit and went running off screaming across the train tracks, slapping at himself as though his clothes were on fire, and Maven and his friend split, having had not such a bad night after all.
Someone had erected a cairn of stones from the track bed, and Danielle was dismantling it, hurling the stones into the trees, one by one. Maven watched her, wondering why that DEA cop would be asking questions about her and not Royce.
“Hey!” he said. “Come off of there.”
She turned and flipped him off. “What, you think I’m going to jump in front of an oncoming train or something? Trains jump in front of me, fuck.” She yelled it loud, both ways down the tracks: “Fuck!” The echoes carried off like escaping footsteps.
Maven smashed his bottle and opened another with his teeth. Everything smelled the same as it had those interminable summers, growing up. Wildflowers and berries, everything baking in the sun.
Danielle tossed her beer bottle, which landed in the bushes and did not shatter. She turned to walk off the tracks and stumbled on the stones, falling onto her ass. She kicked at the offending stones, smiling at herself, but didn’t get up. She sat there staring at Maven.
“What?” he said.
“You. Either you hate me right now, or you love me.”
Maven felt a cool tingle. “What are you talking about?”
“Nobody else puts up with me. Nobody bothers. You waste soooo much time on your boss’s girlfriend.”
“It’s true.”
“Okay. That’s not hate.”
Maven was annoyed enough to be truthful. “Then I guess I’m just another idiot in a long line of idiots.”
“I wonder who has the lower opinion of themselves, you or me?”
“It’s me.”
“But you don’t act out.” She took another drink, squinting up and down the sunny tracks. “Birthdays suck, you know that?”
She tossed the open quart of rum over to him. He caught it without spilling any and took a drink.
She got to her feet, still looking down the line at the train tracks heading into the city. “I was going to get magazine covers. I was going to make a million dollars and Doreen was going to come to New York with me, and I was going to take care of her.” She looked back at Maven with a smile that was pure pain. “And look how that turned out. Look how I turned out.”
Maven didn’t know what to say, or how to say it. She came over and took the rum back from him and drank.
“What else can you do with your teeth?” she asked, looking at him. “I had a friend who could do that thing where you knot a cherry stem with your tongue. She tried to teach me, but I sucked at it.” She was squinting, her face angled up toward the sun. “I want to see your tattoo.”
“I don’t have any tattoos.”
“The one that says BORN TO LOSE, where is it?” She raised his shirt, revealing his torso, halfheartedly trying to turn him around. “On your shoulders?”
“Hey,” he said, not persuasively.
Her hands stayed on his hard chest, flat but tender, a cross between a tickle and a caress. “This thing you have for me, Gridley. It’s not just a freshman hard-on, is it?”
“What thing?”
She grinned and pressed up against him, hands sliding down to his hips, just above the waistband of his cargo shorts. “You still think I’m something, don’t you?”
“I … Jesus … I know you are.”
His shirt was still up around his armpits, and she was brushing her clothed chest against his bare torso. He was getting hard against her hip. “What about your girlfriend? What would she say if she saw—”
“Don’t talk about her.”
Danielle’s mouth came up to his neck. She nuzzled his throat, whispering, “You ever think about me when you’re with her?”
He hadn’t done anything yet. His hands were still down at his sides. He was trying to think about Royce. Trying to remind himself of all the things the man had done for him. But it wasn’t going well.
He said into her ear, “You know I do.”
She kissed him on the mouth. Firm, yet yielding. Tasting, wanting to be tasted.
He was right up at that line. That line he would not cross. Because once across it, he was all in.
She tugged on the front of his shorts. She was undoing his belt. Unbuttoning the top button.
He touched her arms. Didn’t grab or hold them. A halfhearted protest at best.
“What?” She had his shorts open. She wasn’t stopping.
“Just … not here … not this way.”
She said, “Don’t you know by now that nothing ever happens the way you think it will?”
She untied her blouse and pulled it off her shoulders, hooking her thumbs into the straps of her bra and bringing them down so that her breasts fell over the band.
He was on overload. He was so hard, he could barely feel her hand gripping him.
“Jesus,” she said.
If only he had known, he would have jerked off that morning. He told her, “We might have to go twice.”
At some point, a midafternoon train raced past, Maven vaguely aware of the warning horn, the boulder vibrating beneath them. The rest was all a collision of past and present, of desire and attainment.
THEN THE DRIVE HOME.
Maven started twenty different conversations in his
head, none of which made it out of his mouth. Danielle sat with her eyes closed, probably not sleeping. Dreaming, maybe, but not sleeping.
Her smell was all over him. He didn’t regret this yet, if he would at all. He only wanted to know, what next? What do we do now? Will this ever happen again?
He backed into the alley garage, killed the engine, pressed the steering-wheel button to lower the garage door.
She turned to him and kissed him before he could speak, long but not deep. A shut-up kiss. She got out of the car, and he did the same.
Royce was coming downstairs with Termino as they went up. Maven was a few steps behind Danielle.
“Everything okay?” Royce asked, stopping.
Danielle shrugged and said, “Ask Gridley,” walking past him to the third floor.
Royce watched her go a moment, then turned to Maven. Maven gripped the handrail tightly, transferring all his panic there, so that the rest of him looked relaxed.
Royce said, “That bad, huh? You look like you’ve been through the wringer.”
Maven felt Termino eyeing him more than Royce. “She, uh … we split a six-pack.”
Royce nodded and continued down the stairs, patting Maven lightly on the shoulder. “You could have said no, you know.”
Maven didn’t like the grin Termino gave him as he went past.
GYROSCOPE
MAVEN HEARD THE BLOW-DRYER TURN OFF. HE ROLLED OVER, sunlight slanting across the rumpled white comforter. The bathroom door opened and Samara came out dressed in a tan and brown suit.
Maven pushed up a bit, his bare shoulders and his head visible. “Another interview?”
“For a job I don’t even really want. With a company that probably won’t hire me. My career counselor suggested a few test interviews to warm up.” She found her wristwatch on the nightstand, next to his. “Wish I had your life.”
“No.” Maven picked up the toy gyroscope next to the alarm clock. A physics course requirement her sophomore year. “Just my hours.”
He wound the string through the eyehole and got it spinning on the pad of his finger, the rotor tumbling inside the whirring gimbals while the exterior remained fixed.
She put in earrings. “Trouble at home?”
“Huh?” he said, unable to look up from the inner workings of the device.
“I like you spending time here, don’t get me wrong. I just can’t tell if it’s me or that you need a place to chill.”
He transferred the gyroscope to the middle finger of his opposite hand so that he could reach for her leg where her skirt stopped below her knee. “Why don’t you stay awhile if the interview is a nothing?”
She batted away his hand. “You’re a bad influence.” She walked away into the kitchen. “Now—out of my bed.”
She was gone by the time he emerged from the shower. He tossed his things into his backpack, finding his MP3 player on her laptop—Samara was a Freestyle music freak, late-1980s and early-1990s dance tunes, which she loaded onto his player while he slept—and headed out the door with his pack slung over one shoulder, munching toast.
As he turned off the stoop toward Cambridge Street, a body exited a parked car across the street. Maven did not turn to look. He kept on walking toward the busy intersection, listening to the shoes scuffing the sidewalk behind him. If it was a gunman, this was going to be bad. He made ready to throw off his backpack, stopping and turning fast.
“Easy there, tiger.” It was the DEA agent, Lash, wearing a long, asphalt-colored raincoat, a pen and a small notebook in his hand like a reporter.
Maven looked around for more agents. Lash was alone.
“You should really go down to the registry, update your license. Seems you no longer live in Quincy. In fact, it seems you have no known address. Got your motorcycle regged here, yet you’re not on the lease and the landlord doesn’t know you.”
Maven nodded, but inside he was cursing himself. Still—better to do this here than outside Marlborough Street.
“I got some bill collectors on me, I’m saving up to pay them off.”
“Must be some heavy bills. You’re living here now?”
“Kind of bouncing around with friends. Getting back on my feet.”
Lash smiled. “You look pretty solid on your feet, you ask me.” Lash put away the pen and notebook. “I wonder what it is you’re up to.”
Maven gave him his best shrug. “Just trying to live my life, man.”
“I was going to ask your girlfriend when she came out, but I thought I’d give you a shot at explaining yourself first.”
Maven bristled at the thought of Samara being buttonholed by a federal agent.
“Now, I did you a solid there,” said Lash. “Least you can do is answer a couple of questions.”
Maven turned his hands up in a gesture of Go ahead.
“Had any more time to think about that girl you were fighting over?”
Danielle again. “When do I get to know what the hell this is about? You said you were from the Drug Enforcement Agency?”
“Administration.”
“What?”
“It’s the Drug Enforcement Administration. Common mistake.”
“Okay. What does anything have to do with me?”
“That’s what I’m here about.”
“Nothing, is what this has to do with me. I stay far away from that shit. Would a piss test get you off my back?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay …”
“I don’t waste my time with end users. That’s like picking crumbs out of the carpet. They got vacuum cleaners for that shit. I’m about where these crumbs break off from. The big cookie, shall we say.”
Maven shook his head. “No idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
Lash smiled, having trouble reading Maven. “See, there’s this gang of thieves going around, ripping off players. High-level players. Six-figure deals, not street-corner shakedown. They hit the transaction itself, knocking out both sides, buyers and sellers, pocketing the cash but trashing the stash.”
Maven put forward a shrug. “Sounds good to me. I don’t see the problem.”
“Problem is, that’s my job they’re doing. And not doing it well. Busting up sales without jailing any dealers just ramps things up out on the street. Makes bad people paranoid, and paranoid people crazy.”
Maven said nothing, waiting.
“This spring, I had this importer, name of Gilberto Vasco, a Venezuelan, highly placed, thaw out dead in the Charles, his hands and tongue cut off. Seems he’d been taken off by these guys a few months before. Now you say, ‘What’s one less drug dealer?’ And you’re right. No argument from me. But dig this. These bandits who maybe think they’re on their way to becoming folk heroes—this murder could just as easily get pinned on them. So there’s that.”
Lash was looking for a reaction. Maven tried hard not to give him one.
“Here’s another funny thing I figured out. All the drugs being junked and the money being stolen—as much as I can guesstimate, anyway—source from two of the three kingpins in the Greater Boston area. Three pipelines of product, two of which keep getting blown up, while the third—it just keeps flowing. Untouched.”
Maven didn’t know how much of this was true. Maybe Lash was trying to trick him. “Again, I don’t know what—”
“Somebody’s taking drug profits off the table. Upsetting the balance of things. Now this shit is starting to boil over, it’s coming to a head. I’m telling you this vet to vet. Something’s gotta give. The bottom line, if you need one, is that all this bullshit makes my job harder. And I don’t need the competition, or the aggravation. I’m gonna put a stop to it, one way or another.”
Lash fished around inside his pocket for something, a business card. He scribbled his mobile number on the back, then tucked the card into Maven’s jacket pocket with a generous smile.
“See you around.”
UNSTOPPABLE NINJAS
MAVEN STILL CONSIDERED HIM
SELF FAITHFUL AND LOYAL TO Royce. He did this by confecting a clear rationale for his actions: he was not hooking up with the girlfriend of the man who made him; he was hooking up with a girl about whom he used to fantasize. It was a separate thing, a special thing. Danielle was like a dream he could slip into at will.
This druglike high of sexual attraction made bearable the drug-sick lows, the yearning, the worry. They had hooked up twice since, once in a Marriott in Natick, once at a Hilton in Dedham. Maven tried to avoid Royce, without seeming to avoid him, a plan that could last only so long. He tried to avoid Danielle too, at least when in the others’ eyes. The subterfuge wore on him.
He heard his own paranoia echo back at him in the voices of the marks they were snooping on. The dealers were consumed with security measures. The Sugar Bandits were deep inside their heads, haunting every move. They had their cop running criminal checks on any passing car deemed suspicious, which made them tricky to eyeball. Maven didn’t like the resulting lack of physical surveillance. It didn’t feel complete, leaning so heavily on telephone intercepts and ghost-phone spooking. Like listening to a movie on radio. Getting maybe 40 percent of the details and having to intuit the rest.
The cop: he was the key to all this. Instead of making their job harder, he actually made it a little bit easier because, as the dealers’ perceived ace in the hole, they took few other special precautions. The cop boasted of his knowledge of security measures and hinted at some special insight into the inner workings of the bandits. The exchange was to be a standard meet, consummated at a Hyde Park auto repair shop owned by one of the cop’s friends. A transport truck would rendezvous with them at the Sturbridge rest area of the Massachusetts Turnpike and be tailed on the highway by the cop in his personal vehicle. He would provide a similar pickup for the sellers. This hours-long prelude to the deal only spoke to the cop’s ignorance: the bandits could strike only at the point of transfer. Every other precaution was a waste of effort and time.
