by Chuck Hogan
HE WAS NEAR THE OCEAN. HE COULD SMELL IT SOMETIMES. HE COULD hear the surf roaring. Like a beast calling for him.
The seagull was back in the tree. He wanted to come back in. He wanted Maven’s eyes.
MAVEN AWOKE PROPPED UP ON A FEW PILLOWS. A NOTEBOOK COMputer was set on his chest.
“Because I know you wouldn’t take my word for it.”
The man was in his chair, legs crossed. The other man, the white Jamaican, was behind him.
Maven’s right arm was unstrapped. He looked at the computer screen. This was some kind of trick.
“Go ahead. I put up some recent articles from the paper. You don’t have all day.”
On the screen were half a dozen windows open one on top of another. He had trouble reading the type and had to keep blinking and looking away, regaining his focus. So he could not read sequentially and instead had to absorb the writing in static chunks.
Massacre in Easton.
Cranberry Farmers Arrive Home to Bloodbath.
Nephew among dead in reputed drug deal gone bad.
Recent spate of Hub-area drug violence.
Maven scanned the print for names.
Curt Bellson.
James Glade.
Carlito Suarez.
The article noted the number of dead Iraq War veterans on the list. Three besides Glade and Suarez.
Sidebar: Veterans and Crime.
Another window, another article.
Gangland Slaying in Fort Hill.
Broadhouse, one of the kingpins, had been murdered in his home along with three associates.
Another window.
Milton Mansion Sees Night of Deadly Violence.
Crassion, another kingpin, dead. A so-called mob hit.
Sidebar: Recession brings consolidation, contraction in urban drug trade.
Another window.
Chelsea Piano Factory Shootout Claims Four.
Local Drug Baron Disappears.
A surveillance photograph showed a tough guy walking into a bar, a younger version of the man sitting in the chair. The caption gave his name as Lockerty.
The third kingpin.
“He hit us all. Bing, bang, boom. Only missed me because—guess what?—I was out here at the shore. With you.”
Maven let his head fall back. He was dizzy from reading and from the information gleaned.
“You still don’t get it, do you? It’s like I kidnapped a retarded kid nobody wants back.”
Maven lifted his head again to look at Lockerty.
“It’s Royce, you fuck. You did his bidding for months, knocking over the competition, cutting deep into mine and Broadhouse’s distribution. Yeah—Royce was Crassion’s boy. Until he turned on him a few weeks ago. I figured all this out. Crassion’s plan was to use his secret soldier Royce to jack his competition and, in doing so, squeeze street supply down to a dribble, raising prices all over town. You were Royce’s hit squad. I guess he needed you out of the way, cleaning his own house before he went scorched-earth. Set you up at that berry farm to end the bandit phase of the plan. A citywide coup. Crassion got what was coming to him, that fucking phony—and now Royce is king. Running everything single-handedly. An empire you helped him build.”
Maven looked again at the laptop on his chest. Was it real?
“You dumb fucking slug. See for yourself. Not like we’re setting you up a home office here. One more minute. Clock’s ticking.”
Maven didn’t know what to do. He looked at the keyboard, wondering how to prove Lockerty wrong. He tried opening up a search engine, but had difficulty getting his stiff hand to work. So he reread the articles he had.
In the “Related Articles” sidebar, he read:
Drug War Link to B.U. Grad’s Murder?
Maven stopped breathing. He moved his finger over the trackpad, trying to get the tiny arrow cursor on the highlighted article.
He finally clicked it and waited for the page to load.
He didn’t read any of it. He just stared at the photograph of Samara Bahaar, dressed in her cap and gown.
HARD TRUTH
THE BLOODLETTING AROUND TOWN IN PART VINDICATED LASH. This didn’t mean that his overseas transfer wasn’t still going through: it was. Or that Windfall wasn’t going to die a slow death in someone else’s hands: it would. But at least he was able to stay out on the street, keeping active, making moves.
He saw Samara Bahaar’s parents at the police station but never spoke to them. The father wore a suit and the mother a yellow patterned sari. The father carried a fraud conviction from a few years back, and a ten-month bid. But nothing tied the murdered college graduate to the bandits. Her friends said that she had met Maven at Club Precipice some months before. They knew that his name was Neal, that he rode a motorcycle, and that he was a real estate agent. They thought he lived on Marlborough Street, though one friend insisted it was Commonwealth Avenue. The parents knew nothing of him, though her younger sister, a high school senior, confirmed that Samara had confided in her about a boyfriend named Neal, a Realtor who was not Indian, who had helped her find her new apartment.
The killer had entered her apartment by key, no sign of a break-in, the girl smothered in her sleep. No agency was listed on the real estate agreement, so Lash visited every office in the Back Bay area, to no avail. Lash did not pursue it any further.
Because Maven was dead. The Sugar Bandits were dead. Maven’s motorcycle had been found in an alley in Cambridge, stripped down for parts. Two identical bikes registered to the other two masked men from the bog massacre, Suarez and Glade, had also been recovered around town.
Lash wished that he had pushed Maven harder. Specifically, he regretted not having intervened directly with Samara Bahaar. Tricky’s death still walked with him, part of his permanent shadow now. What kept Lash moving ahead was the hard truth, long-ago learned, that good people get hurt sometimes. That he controlled nothing in this world. He only policed it.
VOODOO DOLL
AS MAVEN’S BODY HEALED, HIS MIND DETERIORATED.
Left alone in the room, tied to the bed with nothing to occupy him, his brain began to feed upon itself. Eating away the better parts of him.
They let up on his sedation, though the straps remained. With no reason to interrogate Maven, Lockerty had taken to taunting, telling Maven what he and the Jamaican were going to do to him once he was fully healed. Lockerty thought he was mind-fucking Maven, but Maven was already well around the bend.
Royce visited one night. Standing back in the shadows, his arms folded, watching Maven lying in the bed.
“Danielle,” said Maven. “What did you do to her?”
Royce never answered, never moved.
“I TRY TO PUT MYSELF IN THAT BED, YOU LYING THERE HELPLESS, knowing what’s coming. Knowing you will never see the outside of this room. And you don’t say anything. I want to know, how is it you’re not begging me for mercy? For anything?” Lockerty was up and walking around the chair, hiking up his pants. “At least give me the common courtesy of turning you down flat. Or—wait a minute. Are you dumb enough to still have hope? I want to know what keeps you going.”
Lockerty was turned away from Maven, stretching his back, when Maven said, “Revenge.”
Lockerty stopped. He turned. “It speaks.” Lockerty went back to the chair and sat down, newly engaged. He looked at his captive in the bed. “Go on.”
“You want to hurt me?” said Maven, his voice hoarse from disuse. “Get on with it. I’ve earned a beating. I deserve it. Not for ripping you off. For being a patsy. I’ll take whatever you give.”
Lockerty grinned. “Your tough talk is making me hard, soldier.”
“I’m gonna get through it. Whatever you got. It’s the only way.”
“Only way to what?”
Maven laid his head back upon the pillow. “To escape. And go after Royce.”
MAVEN WAS SITTING UP, MORE PILLOWS BEHIND HIS SHOULDERS AND head. The Jamaican stood behind Lockerty eating from a styrofo
am take-out carton, something fishy.
Maven noticed the watch on the Jamaican’s wrist. Maven looked at his own bare wrist. It was his Oris.
“Admire is too strong a word, but I like your fortitude,” Lockerty was saying. “It makes me smile. Your fantasies of retribution. It’s pretty fucking funny, you down here making plans.”
“It’s no fantasy.”
“No? You’re going to will it to happen?”
“What else do I have?”
“I love the spirit. You are a true American, kid. A dreamer and a fool.” Lockerty looked outside the window, the first time Maven had seen him do that. “What you don’t know is, my entire organization, everything I built, is gone, kaput. Me? I’m fine, I’m out here now. I got my head and my balls. I got fire still. You?” Lockerty shrugged. “Even say you did somehow magically escape. The game has changed out there. Royce has all the muscle now. He pulled in Crassion’s organization and added some of his own. Nobody knows where he coops because that’s how he wants it. Otherwise I’d be out there now, instead of here with you. So what makes you think you could succeed before I would?”
“You’re afraid of him,” said Maven. “I’m not.”
A flicker of a smile passed over Lockerty’s face, masking his anger. The words hit a little too close to home. “Is that what it is?”
“That’s why you keep me here like a voodoo doll against him, sticking pins and needles in me.”
Lockerty forced a smile, to prove that he was still enjoying himself. “You shoulda started talking a long time ago.”
“I WAS AMUSING MYSELF WITH THESE THOUGHTS TODAY, THESE scenarios.” Lockerty stood by the window now, leaning against the frame. “I was thinking how funny it would be, how fitting, if I did turn you loose after all. Sent you off on your merry errand.”
Maven’s eyes betrayed nothing, no hope or desire. His future did not hinge on Lockerty’s charity because Maven could no longer be deceived into believing that such a thing existed. No one could ever break his heart again because he no longer had a heart to break.
“His own soldier going after him. Good sport, right? Good opera. In theory.”
Maven said, “You don’t want to do that.”
Lockerty knit his brow, flicking at his ear to show that he didn’t think he had heard Maven right. “Not let you go?” He was more intrigued than before. “Why is that?”
“Because after I get through with Royce, I’m coming back for you.”
Lockerty’s hard stare eventually dawned into a smile.
MAVEN WOKE UP TO FIND SOMEONE SITTING AT THE EDGE OF HIS BED. Not a man but a kid, a teenager, his back to Maven, doing something with his hands. Making a repetitive flip-flip-flip noise that Maven recognized, but not right away. Not until the kid turned and Maven saw his face.
It was Maven himself. The adolescent time bomb, obsessively practicing the flicked-wrist opening of a butterfly knife.
MAVEN STARTLED AWAKE. PAIN IN HIS ARM AS HE THRASHED ABOUT.
The white Jamaican was pulling away from him—an empty syringe in his hand.
Maven tried to get up, forgetting the straps. “What did you do to me?”
“It’s time, soldier,” said Lockerty. “You know nothing, you are nothing. Even as an object of my wrath, you failed. That’s epic emptiness, pal.”
Maven’s arm throbbed. Something working its way through his veins into his heart, then his entire body beyond.
“Time to cut my losses and move on. But first—Mr. Leroy here needs to get something from you.”
The Jamaican came at him, smiling, with something in his hand. A knife with a small, curved blade—and he set upon Maven, carving into his face.
MAKE SURE
TWO BLACK KIDS, NINE-YEAR-OLDS, CROSSED THE FROZEN GROUND behind the park, turning right by the wall of cracked white cement between the two boulevards.
The box stopped them. This was the way they always went and it had never been there before. A refrigerator carton of sagging cardboard, lying on its side, the top flaps folded shut.
One of them kicked it lightly. The other kid pulled the flaps.
They heard something stir inside. They backed off, looking at each other. One silently dared the other to complete the task. The folds bent apart easily.
They saw a pair of legs inside. Worn blue work pants and work boots. The smell out of the box put them off. The guy had pissed himself and maybe puked sometime in the past few hours.
One kid grabbed a stick off the ground, the longest he could find. He poked the guy’s shin. He got no response and poked it again, harder.
The guy groaned and shifted. He sat up. He shielded his face from the harsh winter sun. His eye, and almost half of his face, were thickly bandaged. He fell back, dizzy.
He wasn’t wrinkled like the old-time junkies, but the kids knew high when they saw it.
“Hey.” Maven reached out from the box, dazed and trying to see. “Hey, fellas …”
He received a smack on the top of his wrist and pulled back. He looked again, each of the boys wielding a fallen branch.
Maven said, “Hey, I—”
A whack across his chest. Another against his shoulder. A crack against the crown of his head, and he rolled into a defensive ball.
The blows rained down, barely felt on the surface, only their reverberation throughout his muscles and his bones.
MAVEN CAME TO FIGHTING OFF THE STICK KIDS, BUT NOW IT WAS TWO blue-gloved EMTs, working by the light of a cop’s flashlight in the park.
“What did you take, sir?”
Maven tried to sit up. They pushed him back down.
“How long have you been out on the streets?”
They put a penlight in his one eye, flicking it back and forth.
“Nothing,” the EMT muttered to himself. “Sir? Hello? What happened to your eye?”
Maven tried to respond, but could not put any words together.
Next thing he knew, he was wide-awake in a sickening surge of full consciousness. It looked like an emergency room, but the walls were rocking, streetlights and upper-story apartment windows rushed past the windows. He was inside an ambulance, strapped to a stretcher.
The EMT had boosted him with Narcan, the opiate antidote. All of Maven’s claustrophobia from being confined at Lockerty’s came roaring back, and he thrashed and tore at the single strap across his waist, loosening it enough to slide out onto the floor. The EMT first banged on the partition for help, then held his arms out toward Maven as though he were trapped with a bear.
Maven stood inside the rocking vehicle. He was still alive. He was free somehow. He was back in Boston.
The driver slid open her window and Maven reached through and grabbed her throat. She cut the wheel, supplies spilling from the side of the ambulance. The impact with the telephone pole sent the stretcher into the partition, then back against the doors, popping them open. Maven stumbled out and fell to the curb, hurrying away, half-blind, from the gathering people and the lights.
MAVEN ENTERED THE VERIZON STORE, THE FIRST CUSTOMER OF THE day. The red-shirted greeter welcomed him, Maven pushing past her to the demo phones, all working models.
He squinted at the phone, his vision blurred, his head splitting. He dialed information, asking for Gridley, Massachusetts, a listing for Vetti. The automated system gave him a number and connected him.
While the phone rang, Maven was aware of the salesmen talking about him, trying to figure out what to do about this bandaged bum using the free service in their store.
Danielle’s mother picked up. Maven told her that he was a friend of her daughter’s, trying to track her down.
“I don’t give out that information,” said Mrs. Vetti.
“A phone number, an address. Anything. It’s critical.”
“I just don’t give out that kind of information.”
“Do you … can you tell me, is she all right? Is Danielle okay?”
A long pause made him fear the worst. “Who is this?”
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“A friend. I was at your house for your other daughter’s birthday.”
Another pause. Her hand over the receiver. “She needs a name.”
“She—?” Maven straightened. “Is she there? It’s Neal Maven.”
Mrs. Vetti repeated the name. After some muffled back and forth, the phone was handed to a different person.
“Who is this?” Danielle’s voice.
“Danny?”
A breathless pause. “Neal?”
“You’re all right,” he said, suddenly near tears. “You’re okay.”
“Neal Maven … you’re alive? He said … he said you were …”
“I’m at a phone store, downtown. What are you … what are you doing at your parents’?”
“Brad … he dumped me. Dumped me flat. Threw me out, left me with nothing.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t … he had Glade and Suarez rubbed out. Did you know that?”
“I knew they were … gone.”
“I need you. To see you. I need your help.”
MAVEN LURKED AROUND THE BOSTON FLOWER EXCHANGE ON ALBANY Street, a long, low, fully enclosed, warehouse-style wholesale flower market. Trucks off-loaded flowers from the port and backed them into the exchange, where they were sold to New England retailers. The sign said it was closed on Sundays, and while a few cars dotted the parking lot, the area itself was quiet.
He leaned against the outside wall, hacking into his hand, still sick from whatever shit they’d put in him. It was wearing off now, the pain in the back of his eye as intense as it was unreachable. He was jittery when he should have been hungry. The constant drip of anesthetics and painkillers had turned him halfway into a junkie.
A black Highlander pulled into the lot. Maven remained in the doorway, hidden yet hopeful, having forgotten to ask Danielle what kind of car she would be driving. The SUV pulled near, coming in at an angle, and he stepped out into view.
The tinted windows made Maven stop, but too late. The pas senger’s door opened, and a bald guy with a tribal tattoo on the side of his neck stood out, brandishing a MAC-10 with a muzzle suppressor.
