by Chuck Hogan
It opened on three dead bodies facedown in a slick of blood.
Maven started running. Up the stairs to the front door. He didn’t bother with the radio. He was yelling, “Get out! GET OUT!”
A volley of gunshots. An abrupt yell in Maven’s ear.
Then return gunfire, and a howl.
Maven’s heel crushed the frame plate, the front door cracking inward.
ONE TIME, BACK IN EDEN, WHILE ON PATROL AT A TRAFFIC-CONTROL point in urban Samarra, a buddy of Maven’s loaned him his new Oakleys. The sunglasses had a built-in music player, making Maven’s headspace an oasis in that desert hell. Maven was giving Cal, his buddy, some shit for listening to opera when a sniper round ripped through Cal’s neck. Cal dropped to the sidewalk, dead before he hit the ground.
Maven spotted two fedayeen hustling away from an idling Opal, tucking something under their robes. With Verdi soaring in his head, he chased them through a curtain of smoke, into and out of a marketplace slaughterhouse, ending in a close-quarters firefight in a courtyard.
He heard that same music now as he crashed inside the farmhouse. Time sped up, became fractured into gunfirelike bursts.
Splintering rounds spun him back from the bottom of the stairs. He raced down a narrow hallway, elbows bouncing off the walls.
Glade lay on the kitchen floor, straight out. Head shot.
A barrage from his left drove Maven back into the hall. He returned fire blindly, rounds pummeling his armor like iron knuckles.
He tumbled into a side room and sat back against the dividing wall. The MP5 was hot, smoking. Not empty, but he reloaded anyway, needing a full whack.
He listened. An old house, full of creaks. One loose floorboard groaned on the other side of the wall.
Maven pushed off and spun, firing through the old plaster and wood. He heard a cry and a heavy fall. Return fire rained splinters and dust into the room, and Maven covered his head and ran for the other door. More rounds pelted his back—one penetrating the armor, a hot needle thrust under his shoulder.
Suarez. Termino.
Maven cut out from the wall, riding his open gun across the hallway, galumphing up the carpeted stairs. His left foot was better than his right.
He came upon Suarez at the top landing—slumped against the corner, talking blood.
Rounds stitched Maven’s back, pitching him forward. He turned and fired back down the stairs, clearing some room. From the floor, he ejected his empty and reloaded, grabbing Suarez’s semiauto and slinging it over his shoulder.
Suarez’s eyes followed him. “Get ’em,” he gurgled. “Get ’em.”
With a rush of energy, Maven slid headfirst down the stairs, firing off his right shoulder through the banister. He hit the bottom landing and tumbled away. His gun clicked empty and he reached for his third clip, but it was gone, so he tossed away the MP5 and readied Suarez’s. He could feel warm blood pulsing from his side, running into his underwear. With his free hand, he pushed himself up onto one leg and lurched through the room, firing, circling back to the kitchen.
He looked for Glade’s weapon but it was gone. Another volley erupted, and Maven spun and fired, yelling, slowed by pain. Suarez’s gun jammed, and he dumped it and went into a one-legged run-crawl—hitting the door, finding himself outside on the side porch. Not where he wanted to be.
He dragged his right leg, bumping past an old-fashioned porch swing to the rear. Beyond the railing and the short yard lay the acre of bog shrouded under fog. No way he could make it to the trees, but he had to try.
He pitched himself over the porch railing, dropping to the ground. From his leg strap, he drew his backup, a 9 mm Sig Sauer, and waited.
Blood dripped down the heel of his hand over the textured grip. His right leg was going cold.
Termino carried the out phone for calling Royce. Maven’s only hope. But where was Termino?
One stepped onto the porch. Coming out in a crouch. Maven balanced on his good leg.
Two shots turned the gunman around. Two more shots finished him.
Maven dropped back, counting rounds. Four down, eleven to go. Thinking, Save one for me.
Another gunman edged around the corner, behind the slow-moving porch swing. Maven fired through the railing, pushing him back.
Then two more shots cracked out of a window, and Maven had to retreat.
He dragged himself to the harvesting equipment, stopping behind it, where he had left his empty wet bag. He fell back, dizzy. Too much pain, but he kept going.
He splashed into the bog. He had the crazy idea of submerging himself under the berries, but it was too shallow to hide him. He frogged it out a few yards before falling over.
He turned and saw the gunmen coming for him. His pistol against two full auto fire-barkers.
Maven turned back toward the trees, the floating acre of undulating berries and fog. Looking out at that dreamscape in this last moment, his thoughts went to Danielle. It had all been worth it. Every minute.
He pulled his gun hand from the water, the 9 mm dripping as he pressed it to his temple and squeezed the trigger.
The pistol clicked. Nothing happened. He shook out the wet gun and tried again.
Nothing. He slumped and dropped the weapon into the bog. He turned back to face them as the gunmen advanced to the berm at the edge of the water.
For a moment they hesitated, unsure which one should take the kill.
They looked like soldiers. They looked like him.
Then, an explosion of gunfire, but not from them. From the side of the house, ripping into them from behind. Shredding them before they could even fire back. The gunmen pitched forward, dead.
Maven’s first thought was Termino. But two men came swimming into his vision, advancing to the berm.
Men in street clothes. Two new killers.
Maven slipped back, below the surface of the water. Berries clouded in over his murky vision—then darkness.
REIGN’S END
ELEVEN TOTAL HOMICIDES, FIVE INSIDE, SIX OUTSIDE.
A detective lieutenant of the Massachusetts State Police told Lash, “The homeowners came back a day early from a family wedding down in North Carolina. Found this.”
Lash looked out at the floating berries from the side of the porch, near the swing. “They don’t know these guys? These cars?”
“Only the stiff in the Saab. Their nephew. Saw him twice a year, Thanksgiving and Easter. Quite a shock. He had been invited to the wedding, but declined.”
“Borrowed their house instead.” Geese honked overhead, a phalanx of five flapping toward the trees. “So can you piece together any sort of timeline here?”
“Unofficially, it looks like the guys in the vehicles were done first. No armor on them, and only two pistols, both still with the guys in the van, neither one discharged. Body-armor guys, we’re still sorting that out. Robbery gone bad? Got pills in the back of the Honda, cash in the van.” The detective’s phone beeped, and he silenced it. “We got two guys in masks, the rest without. No ID on anyone. One thing I do know, that sticks out, is that the two down by the bog there, they were killed by different ammo than the others. Found shells there, in the grass, that don’t match any of the recovered weapons. Of which there are plenty.”
“High-action pieces,” said Lash.
“So, what do you think? These your guys?”
Lash looked out at the two staties in hip waders, doing a grid search of the bog. “Two in masks?”
“One upstairs, one downstairs.”
“Let’s take a look.”
Ballistics, Criminalistics, and Crime Scene Services officers were all over the inside. Lash viewed the faces of all the deceased, lingering over the two masked men.
One was a blond. The other Latino.
Neither one was Neal Maven.
Maybe the guy had been clean after all. Either way, this sure looked to Lash like the end of the Sugar Bandits’ reign.
He went back and checked the faces of the other armor
ed corpses. It was speculation, but the haircuts and builds said military. “Bound to happen,” said Lash.
“You seem disappointed.”
“I wanted them for myself. When you run the prints, try military first.”
“You think?”
“These aren’t cons. These guys are soldiers.”
HE PARKED OUTSIDE CRASSION’S GATE, THIS TIME PRESSING THE CALL button on the keypad. He pressed it a few times and got nothing back. So he went over the wall again.
He walked up the drive to the circular court, looking for the bodyguards. He reached the front door without being accosted. He tried the handle and the door opened.
Lash didn’t go inside at first. He brought out his cell and dialed 911. He identified himself to the dispatcher and asked to be put through to Milton PD. From them, he requested backup.
He drew his Browning Hi-Power 9 mm, readying the pistol with both hands. The foyer inside was empty and quiet. More than quiet. Lash listened, standing still.
A smell reached his nose. A tinge of cordite.
Then it was only a matter of finding the body. Which he did in the book-lined study where he had met with Crassion a few days before. The kingpin lay dead from a head shot that had blasted back part of his skull. The body wasn’t more than a day old.
Lash backed out and made his way through the house, room by room, door by door. No one else, and no sign of a struggle.
Crassion’s muscle had vanished. Lash wondered about that.
The Milton cops arrived and he badged himself and explained the situation. He then dialed the state police detective at the cranberry bog and told him to have his team grab lunch on the way over to Milton as soon as they were through.
Before he could hang up, he received a call from his office telling him of a shoot-out up in Fort Hill, at Broadhouse’s place. The news turned Lash’s chest cold.
Two Pins down, one to go.
Lockerty.
Whoever got the bandits didn’t seem all that interested in collecting their bounty.
THE SHORE
MAVEN STRUGGLED TO CONSCIOUSNESS.
Amber clouds floating above him came into focus as water stains on an old plaster ceiling.
He was in a bed. Mattress springs creaked as he turned his head. He made out a chair. He made out a window.
He tried to sit up but could not lift his head.
He looked to the other side and saw a bag suspended from an inverted coat hanger nailed to the wall. An IV bag.
He was on a drip inside someone’s house.
He tried to sit up again and kept trying until the room swirled and he fell into darkness.
HEY. HEY.
A voice, only.
You are mine now. Understand? Mine.
* * *
THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST WET HIS LIPS AS HE PICKED THROUGH VIALS inside the messenger bag, looking for a twenty-milliliter ampoule of propofol. He shook it, warming the sedative in his hand. He noted that they had replaced the hydromorphone and Demerol, exactly as he had requested. He was alone in the bedroom but for the man in the bed, who was deeply unconscious.
He checked the IV lines in the manner of the doctor he had once been. He had learned to work with the shakes. He checked the closed door behind him, always afraid of being watched, then pocketed a syringe of midazolam for later.
He picked out a vial of vecuronium, an intravenous muscle relaxant more accurately defined as a paralyzing agent. Too high a dose would shut down the body’s respiratory system in minutes, leading to sudden death. The last time he had held a vial of vecuronium in his hand was inside the surgery bathroom of Mt. Auburn Hospital. When the police finally broke through the door, they found him dressed in blue surgery scrubs, sitting on the floor with a handful of stolen syringes in his lap, injecting propofol into the femoral artery of his left leg. He was an authority on the chemistry, pharmacology, and therapeutic considerations of the most potent and addictive medications available to humankind. And his one need in life now was to have access to these powerful narcotics. He had a significant court date coming up that would prohibit his access indefinitely, an eventuality that demanded its own solution, to be acted upon at the appropriate time. In his mind, he was drawing up an anesthesiologist’s dream last meal, a feast of opioids and sedatives for his central nervous system.
He administered the vecuronium in advance of the patient’s surgery, pocketing the rest. He watched the man in the bed, recognizing subtle changes in expression as the medicines took effect. The anesthesiologist would have traded places with him in a second, regardless of the man’s bullet wounds. He envied his patient—lying there, submerged within himself—and wished he could somehow split himself in two, administering to himself as patient while simultaneously riding out his own ministrations in blissfully schizophrenic codependence.
A SEAGULL CRIED.
Maven opened his eyes. He watched the amber clouds until they were still.
The bed. The bedroom. A new bag hanging on the wall.
A man in a chair.
“You don’t know me?”
The man was older.
“You don’t recognize the face of the man you stole from?”
The face was that of a man you might sit next to in a coffee shop, flipping through a newspaper, never looking up.
Maven looked at the window. A seagull bobbed on a tree branch.
“I don’t know your name. I don’t know where you’re from. But I know you stole from me. And that is all I need to know.”
Another man stood behind the man in the chair. Maven could not see him.
“Why we waitin’? Dis bumbaklaat fool. He got my blood smoked. Be my personal pleasure reeducatin’ him.”
“This wounded animal? Too damn easy.” The older man stood over him now. “We’re gonna fix you up. Give you time to heal. Get you strong again. So we can break you.”
THE SURGEON EXAMINED HIS WORK AND WAS FRANK ABOUT ITS shortcomings. He had many excuses available: the lack of assisting nurses; the unprofessional bedroom setting in this seaside house; the inferior surgical equipment. But he saw no sign of infection, which was itself a small miracle.
Obviously the patient was some sort of criminal, like the rest of these gangsters. Although they did not appear to regard the man as a comrade. In fact, quite the opposite.
Just fix him up.
Whenever the doctor edged toward asking why he was being paid to heal this man they appeared to detest—
Just fix him up.
The doctor warned them about the gas man, saying he had the patient under too deep.
Justfixhimup.
So, fine. He did. And if some carelessness crept into the surgeon’s work as a result of his treatment by these thugs, well then, too bad. Because you do not talk to people that way. Not if you want their best.
HE HAD A WEIRD, SWIMMY MEMORY OF SOMETHING—A TUBE—BEING pulled out of his throat, like a stubborn carrot from the earth.
He was too stiff to stir. His brain was packed in cotton wadding.
An old man wearing shabby clothes and latex gloves leaned over Maven to check the IV bag. He lifted back the sheet with trembling hands, and Maven felt a vague sense of blunted pain, as an apple might feel a bruise.
The man, a doctor, was checking Maven’s wounds.
“I did my best,” he said, to no one in particular.
Maven tried to speak but his tongue would not work. He focused on the drip-drip of the IV feed, his eyelids drooping in sync.
“YOUR BOSS. ROYCE.”
Maven floated like a bubble suspended in molasses. Someone overturned the jar and he slowly rose to the top.
“That name sure opens your eyes.”
Maven had to check himself. Had he given up Royce’s name?
He tried to fix on the voice of his interrogator, but felt his eyes lolling in their sockets.
“I’m figuring things out about you. Things just coming to me through the air. You can speak, can’t you?”
Th
e other man, the one with the accent, was over Maven now, pressing down on his wounded thigh. Maven’s vision went blazing red. He grunted.
“Good. Gotta make sure I’m not fucking throwing darts at a board that doesn’t have a bull’s-eye.”
THE SEAGULL SAT ON THE BACK OF THE CHAIR. LOOKING AT MAVEN for a long time.
He tried to talk to it. The bird opened its wings and alighted on his thigh.
It stared awhile, then began picking at his surgical wound.
It flew away with stitching trailing from its beak.
“I’M STARTING TO WONDER IF YOU EVEN KNOW.”
Maven knew that his only power here was his silence.
“Remember the cranberry bog? What do you think happened there? You got ambushed, didn’t you? Somebody got tipped off. They were waiting for you.”
The cranberries. Maven felt like one of them now, floating on the surface of consciousness, waiting to be picked and crushed for his juice.
“Who do you think did that? It wasn’t me. My guys came in at the end, on a late tip from one of the buyers, who used to deal with us. Losing business to you punks was bad enough, I couldn’t have this fuck freelancing all around. Honestly I didn’t expect much. Mr. Leroy insisted on going. You see, his partner was killed at that Black Falcon clusterfuck. And he’s none too happy about it.”
Maven’s head was pulled up by his hair, and he was looking into the other man’s eyes.
“You remembering any better now?”
HE TRIED. WHEN HE WAS ALONE. HE TRIED TO REMEMBER.
He ran his hands over his body, searching out his wounds. His lower back, his shoulder, his thigh. Tracing the surgical scars was like piecing together the sequence of the farmhouse shooting.
Glade and Suarez inside. They never had a chance.
And Termino?
“HOTSHOTS, RIGHT? THOUGHT YOU HAD IT ALL. YOU WERE SMARTER than everyone else.”
Maven’s arms were tied to the bed now. Strapped down at his sides.
“This silence of yours, what is it? Loyalty? It’s your dumb loyalty, isn’t it. That’s the key. See—I’m learning to listen. Here I thought I was going to be the one ripping info out of you. But it’s me sitting here with the hammer of knowledge. Waiting to beat the truth into you.”
