The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Doug said, “What’s this with the Florist?”

  Jem passed out the stamp sheets. “His tribute.”

  “And why you involving him?”

  “It’s not like he doesn’t already know about it. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “How’d he know?” Doug let his sandwich drop back onto the wrapper on the bench. “I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anybody. Unless someone here told someone, he didn’t know.”

  “Duggy. People know. People in the Town.”

  “Tell me how they know.”

  “They just know.”

  “What do they know? What? Yeah, maybe they think they know something. But thinking you know something, and actually knowing something—that’s two different things. The cops and the G, maybe they think they know something. But not knowing it is exactly what keeps us on the street, keeps us in the game.”

  “Fergie knows a lot of secrets, Duggy.”

  “And now he’s got one more on us. I don’t see the point of putting it out there.”

  “We don’t duke him, there could be trouble down the road.”

  “How?” Doug felt himself getting carried away and not caring. “Trouble how? What trouble, explain that to me. This ‘Code of Silence’ trial now, everybody in town is an opera star. Clutching their hankies and belting it out for the cops and the papers. The fat lady, she’s singing. Just tell me you didn’t visit him in his shop.”

  “I saw him out on the pier. He’s my mother’s cousin, Duggy.”

  “We’re not Italian, Jem. Third or fourth cousin means maybe a nice Christmas card, not ‘Here’s my kidney, you should need one.’ The G is all over his shop, that is guaran-fucking-teed.”

  “It’s so. But you think he don’t know that?”

  Dez piped up, “That thirty-five grand or so you gave him—he gonna wash that clean before sending it out to the IRA?”

  Jem scoffed and said, “All that’s rumor. That’s just for street cred.”

  Doug said, “Dez thinks he knows that Fergie fronts for the IRA. He doesn’t know it—not like he knows that Fergie puts dust out on the street, not to mention has a taste for it himself. This is a sixty-year-old man on angel dust you’re meeting out there on the pier, Jem kid. Chatting with, handing bank money to.”

  “Look, Fergie’s always putting things into motion. You’re working on our next, sure, but he said, and in not so many words, that he’s got some big things that would suit us nice. That we could buy from him.”

  Doug thought he was going to levitate out of his seat. “Why the fuck would we want to work for someone else? One good reason.”

  “These are marquee scores.”

  “Marquee scores!” Doug waved at the vanished salt. “You got kids in braces or something, that’s not enough? We got more than we can conveniently wash as it is. Marquee scores mean marquee busts, Jem boy. Fergie’s got room on his roster exactly because Boozo’s crew got lazy up in New Hampshire and Boozo’s tweak-freak son, Jackie the Jackal, shot up that armored guard. And the heat from that is still out all over the Town. Jackie’s what, he’s our age? Younger? And he’s gonna die in prison. He’d fucking die there anyway, for being stupid and running his mouth, but eighty years is not something he’s gonna survive. And that’s without a murder charge ever being brought—that’s the racketeering thing, interstate, plus the firearms mandatories. This isn’t kid stuff anymore. We all of us, except the Monsignor, got strikes against us. We take a fall now, with twenty-year gun mandies, we’re never gonna land. Got it? I gotta spell this out in salt for you?”

  Gloansy said, “I ain’t taking no more falls.”

  Doug said, “And I ain’t taking any falls before you. The only thing the law likes less than pro outlaws are reckless outlaws. The G—they don’t like it when you rob banks, that’s fine, fair. Honest heat is honest heat. Toss in kidnapping and assault, their fucking palms start getting sweaty. They take that personal. Suddenly they got jobs on the line—reassignment, whatever. They need results. And we can’t win going up against them nose-to-nose. This crazy Cagney shit you pull, it draws them out. Things go wrong on every job. Trick is, keep moving, don’t fix one fucking mistake with another.”

  In the silence that followed, Doug realized he had gone on what was for him a tirade. He was the only one who could talk to Jem like this, and even he was pushing it. Gloansy, or especially Dez, they would have been on the floor with Jem’s knee in their throat.

  Jem was making a show of fishing food out of his teeth with his tongue. Doug had been sitting on this stuff too long. He didn’t even know specifically why he was so pissy himself. It was the jokes, it was the beer on their breath and the hour of the day. It was all of their youth going round and round in circles on the ice down there.

  “Fuck it,” Doug said with a wave. “You want to duke the Florist, fine, duke the Florist. Keep him happy? Fine. But I won’t work for him. We are pros here, not cowboys in a Wild West show. We’re different. That’s what keeps us ahead in this cat-and-rat game. Free agents, we gotta stay smart, full-time, else we’ll get beat. I will walk away before I became some gangster’s personal fucking ATM machine. If I even thought that was coming, I’d walk away right now.”

  Jem put on a grin. “Bullshit. You could never walk away.”

  Doug said, “Have to, someday.”

  “You’d make a real good old woman, you didn’t have such a fucking nose for crime. Only you could be raggy about this score.”

  Doug chewed and watched the kids make their way off the ice, skate-walking to the doors.

  “Duggy’s share is back at my place,” said Jem, proceeding as if nothing had happened. To Gloansy and Dez, he handed over orange-headed locker keys. “Your pieces are out front. Remember, it’s all dirty linen and’s got to be washed. Now, last thing—bank manager.”

  Looking at Doug. Doug shrugged and said, “Yeah?”

  “You grabbed her license from me. What’s the scoop?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Thought you said she lives in the Town.”

  “Hasn’t been back home yet. I think we can forget about her. So long as you ditched the masks, she’s got nothing.”

  “Course I ditched the masks.”

  “Well, you seemed pretty fond of your artwork, I want to be sure.”

  “Masks, tools, everything ditched.”

  Doug shrugged. “Then whatever.”

  Gloansy said, “I saw her on the news, being walked away, her father. She’s too shaken up to tell them shit anyway.”

  “Yeah,” said Doug, swiping his nose like the manufactured cold was getting to him.

  “Done, then,” said Jem. “We’re clear. With that, this investment club meeting is officially adjourned.”

  Dez packed up his trash. “Gotta rock.”

  “I’m behind you,” said Doug, bagging his.

  “Whoa, where you running off to?” said Jem. “What clock you on?”

  “I got some stuff,” said Doug.

  “Blow it off. Free ice now. Me and Gloansy gonna skate.”

  “Can’t,” said Doug, rising, Dez already smacking fists and starting out.

  Jem frowned and said to Gloansy, “Guy lives in my house, I never see him.”

  Doug said, “I gotta breeze. You know how I get, between things.”

  “So stay. Have a few tall boys with us, relax. Gloansy brought his goalie pads, he’s gonna let us take shots at him.”

  “Fuck you,” sang Gloansy, lifting out the last skinny slice.

  “I’m walking,” said Doug, starting down the scarred planks. “Besides, you’re wrong. I do got a job. Keeping you homos in line.”

  “Ho, shit,” said Jem, their little tiff passing like a storm cloud. “That’s some full-time work right there.”

  DOUG CAME OUT THROUGH the doors as Dez was pulling his cut from the rink lobby lockers, the size of two thick phone books wrapped in butcher paper. Jem had left a Filene’s shopping bag folded in there and Dez dumped the p
ackage inside, rolling the bag into a bundle and tucking it up under his arm, football-style. They walked together through the doors out into the hard, white daylight.

  Dez said, “Ma’s been after me to get you over for dinner again.”

  “Yeah, we’ll do that soon.” The high sun summoned up in him a tremendous, satisfying sneeze.

  “God bless,” said Monsignor Dez.

  Doug squinted. “You going up to drop half that in the collection box right now?”

  “No time. Later.”

  “St. Frank’s gonna put a hot tub in the confessional before you’re done.”

  Dez looked at Doug without a smile. “The split’s light,” he said. “Isn’t it.”

  Doug rubbed his eyes. “Ah, fuck it.”

  “Why? Why let him be in charge? You know you run things. And that whole dock thing, that was a charade.”

  Doug shrugged, truly uninterested. “Hey, what’s a IDSN line?”

  “ISDN,” Dez corrected. “Data streaming, high-speed Internet. Like if I was a plumber bringing you your water, this’d be a much wider pipe. Fiber optics. Makes World Wide Web surfing like changing channels.”

  “Yeah? That the future?”

  “Today it is. Tomorrow, who knows? Someday there’ll be no wires, I know that. Someday there’ll be no linemen.”

  “Maybe you oughta think about getting something going on the side.”

  Dez smiled in the direction of the highway. “I gotta roll.” They rapped fists, Dez taking off down the incline with the bundle of cash under his arm.

  Doug turned and went the other way, up Old Rutherford, habitually scanning the parked cars for snoops as he went. He turned right on Devens and followed it around to Packard, a one-way street, one of the few in the tightly packed Town with a back alley. The narrow alley showed bow windows and Juliet balconies over brick walls separating tiny parking spaces. Empty trash cans stood at every cobblestoned parking court except Claire Keesey’s, the plum Saturn still gone. A poker hand of takeout menus was fanned inside her back screen door.

  Keep moving, he told himself, jamming his fists inside the pockets of his warm-up jacket, pretending he was satisfied. All he had done was save her from a beating. He lowered his head like a regular citizen and walked on.

  4

  PLAYSTATION

  THE BACK OF THE hill was Charlestown without the gas streetlamps. It was wooden row houses with stepped roofs and front doors that opened onto sidewalks sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the sea. During the Blizzard of 1978, on plastic Super Saucers and collapsed cardboard box “project sleds,” neighborhood kids got up over twenty miles an hour bombing down the sheer faces of Mystic, Belmont, and North Mead before bottoming out hard onto Medford Street below.

  The gentrification that had made new virgins out of other Town fiefdoms such as Monument Square, City Square, and the Heights, had embraced but not yet transformed the uncapitalized old lady known simply as “the back of the hill.” Its curbs saw a few Audis and Acuras, designer water bottles lay in some recycling bins, and most exteriors had been power-washed and painted smooth. But Irish lace still fluttered in a few windows, a handful of Boston firefighters and city employees still calling it home.

  Doug ate two buttered corn muffins out of a wax paper bag at the crest of Sackville Street. His large tea, thick with milk and sugar, steamed out of the tall Lori-Ann’s cardboard cup set on the roof of his rust-pocked 1986 Caprice Classic.

  Breakfast there was for him a regular thing. The house he was looking at across the street, with its rich red siding and nurse-white trim—formerly dove gray over flaking charcoal—was the home of his youth. He still considered it his mother’s house even though she had abandoned it, and him, when he was six years old. His father managed to hold on to it for ten more years, meaning, and this seemed impossible, that Doug had lived half his life away from it now. It still ruled his dreams: the monster oil tank in the stone basement; the dark wood parlor with cabinet radiators and custard wallpaper; his corner bedroom on the first floor, swept by passing headlights.

  This was the place he went to get his head together. A bungled job—this one had netted them plenty, but he would forever think of the caper as failed—always left him in a sour mood, but never with the mental mono like this one had. He returned to the heist over and over in his head, trying to untangle its faults, only to get caught up again in the image of the branch manager blindfolded next to him in the van. This image possessed him, how fragile she had appeared, yet also how composed. How she had wept tearlessly beside him—he had felt her shaking, her hands limp and empty in her lap—like a statue of a blindfolded woman crying. Having followed this stranger around, he now felt himself getting sucked into the mystery of her existence.

  He was breaking out of that rut today. It was April and the sidewalks of the Town were teeming with Claire Keeseys, drawn to the neighborhood by its cheap rents and safe streets, baring their shoulders and legs after a long winter’s hibernation. The Town was a stocked lake and fishing was back in season. This fog, whatever it was that had descended on him at the beginning of the bank job and lingered in the days that followed—it was finally lifting.

  He shook his head and crumpled up the muffin bag. His not telling the others about her triggering the alarm: that was not going to haunt him anymore. It was over with. In the past. Time to move on.

  “CHECK THIS OUT,” said Jem.

  Doug set down his liter slam of Mountain Dew and accepted the wrinkled Victoria’s Secret spring catalog. On page after page, Jem had applied a drop of water to each of the lingerie models’ breasts, puckering the thin paper and raising persuasive nipples.

  Doug nodded, turning the pages. “And you say this project only took you half the morning?”

  “Some days, you know? You just wake up horny. I have all this fucking energy, I already worked out twice today, shoulders and calves. What do you do, days when you can’t focus on anything because your mind keeps running back to your dick?”

  “Some call it ‘applying the pine tar.’”

  “No, no,” said Jem, shaking his head. “No, I don’t do that anymore.”

  “Excuse me, what?” Doug smiled. “You don’t do that anymore?”

  “They say weed saps your ambition? I say, yanking it does. Saps your drive. Makes you soft, more ways than one. Always leaves me tired, dopey. I’m serious.”

  “You’ll be down in the basement three times a day, working out, and all that’s gonna happen is, spume’s gonna back up into your system, turn you gay. I seen it happen, man. It’s tragic.”

  “Voice of experience here.”

  “Radical idea just came to me out of the blue. How about going easy on yourself, getting a regular girlfriend?”

  “I think I do awright. And I’m gonna start doing even better. Abstinence makes the dick grow fonder. Hey, you’re the last person should be giving shit. Mister fucking life change already.”

  Doug dragged the remote off the glass-topped coffee table and opened up the cable menu over the soft-core pool-table scene playing on Jem’s black box Spice Channel. He found a kung fu movie on pirated pay-per-view, put it on the huge TV. “Your eyesight improves, maybe you can get a smaller screen.”

  “Hey, how about this. Tonight, right? They say yanking it also gives you hairy palms, right? Okay, we get that spirit gum like we used for the Watertown job, the stuff that gave us fake chins and cheeks? Slop it on our hands instead, then shred up a wig, stick fur on there. Walk in the door at the Tap with all the yuppies, give the place a big wave. High-five the bartender with our furry mitts.”

  Doug grinned. “You walk in reading your catalog?”

  “I will spill water on my crotch before I walk in, a nice round little cum stain.” He mimed walking into the bar for Doug, open hand raised, hips thrust forward, big Irish smile. “Evening, friends!”

  Doug said, “This, right here, is why we don’t have regular girlfriends.”

  “For Christ, then it’s w
orking.” Jem hopped down Fonzie-style onto his green leather couch and grabbed a PlayStation controller. “Bruins,” he called.

  They played NHL ’96 on Jem’s Trinitron, first a couple of straight games with the crowd noise roaring in stereo, then they ignored the puck and skated their players around the ice looking for trouble, doling out hard checks until helmets popped off and the view zoomed in and the computer men threw down their gloves, the announcer bellowing in sim surround, FIGHT!

  At one point, Jem turned to Doug, eyes bleary with game glee. “Like old times, kid! Can you tell me why we don’t do this every fucking day?”

  Eventually Doug had to step out past the tower speakers to take a piss. The worn checkerboard bathroom tile, the rotten shower curtain, the foam-coated pipes running up through the ceiling into his own third-floor bathroom: it all seemed virtual to him, flickering, pixilated. At that moment the computerized rink with its frictionless ice was more real to him than Jem’s mother’s house.

  He stepped back into the narrow hallway with its undulating walls and twitching corners, a world with seams, the framed photograph of Cardinal Cushing hanging over the long-dry holy-water bowl looking poor-graphics fuzzy.

  The sound of the glass rattling on the downstairs door sent a dead feeling through Doug, the caffeine and carbonation draining from his alter world, his game buzz gone flat.

  “Krista’s home,” he said, returning to Jem.

  “It’s cool, man, she won’t bug us.”

  “Let me get my take, get it squared away.”

  Jem smiled icily. “You’re gonna breeze.”

  “No. Just get my shit squared away, then come right back down.”

  Jem stood, unconvinced, going to the frame of the doorway between the parlor and the neglected second-floor kitchen. He yanked on the molding and brought it loose in one long piece, revealing plywood shelves nailed in between the old walls like a row of mail slots. Jem withdrew Doug’s bundle, leaving many smaller newspaper-wrapped parcels behind, many ripped open and spilling cash.

  “You stash here?” said Doug.