The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  If the Bunker Hill Monument was the needle of the Charlestown sundial—the Town an irregular circle bleeding yolklike to the northwest—Doug had left the Tap at about nine o’clock, now headed for eight. His mother’s house on Sackville stood at just after eleven, Jem’s mother’s house on Pearl ticking closer to midnight.

  Packard Street, Claire Keesey’s address, stood at about six thirty.

  That previous night, he had found her plum Saturn returned to its brickwalled space. The no-haggle, sporty-cute coupe had been parked nose-in, the wasted spoiler and happy-face Breathe! sticker turned to the alley. It was while sitting there in his car looking at her dimly lit, second-floor windows that the question Now what? had occurred to him. He was wasting his time cruising a stranger’s house, looking for… yeah, for what?

  Pride had finally made him peel out of there, racing the Caprice up narrow Monument Avenue—a tunnel of brick row houses rising to the stage-lit granite dick. He returned home and slid her driver’s license out of its hiding place behind the sill of his kitchen window. The ID had seen a lot of action, its plastic laminate curled at the edges, creased from long nights in tight pockets. In the unflattering photograph she looked startled, like someone bumped from behind in mid-smile.

  The plastic blackened and sagged before it burned, her image melting, crying, the license suffering in his ashtray before curling up and surrendering oily black smoke. A simple ceremony to put an end to his wrongheaded infatuation.

  Then this very evening, on his way out to Malden for his meeting, as he pulled into the Bunker Hill Mall to grab a Mountain Dew—there it was, pulled up to the curb outside the Foodmaster like a bomb waiting to go off, the bumper sticker screaming at him, Breathe!

  He parked one row away, sitting there, his hands relaxed on the steering wheel, watching the ticking Saturn in his rearview mirror. Then, cursing himself, he was out of the Caprice and cutting across the parking lot, guessing CVS and moving inside, checking the store aisle by aisle.

  He spotted her halfway down in Hair Care. She wore a red sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, Avia ballcap, running shoes, and amber sunglasses. It was a familiar look around Town, the frumpy weekend girl, yuppies doing their errands behind hats and glasses and baggy clothes, no one in the Town much worth impressing.

  He fooled with packs of playing cards at the end of the aisle while she weighed conditioners. Some ballcaps on women looked wrong, joyless, severe—but Doug could see her running out a slow grounder up the first-base line, her sunny blond ponytail flying. She chose a tube the color of butterscotch, and Doug tailed her across two aisles to the magazine racks, where she pulled down People. She sidetracked into the wide central aisle, looking watchful all of a sudden, grabbing a quart-sized carton of Whoppers malted-milk balls and folding the magazine around it before walking to the front.

  Doug pulled a Cadbury crème egg out of the clearance bin and fell into line behind her. He smelled the vanilla that was maybe the last of her old conditioner and eyed the faintly freckled slope of her neck. He worried that she would pick up on his presence with some self-protective sixth sense of fear, but she looked only at her small, red key-chain purse, its plastic driver’s license window empty.

  Doug stepped back for her as she left, then spilled some coins for his candy while she helped an old woman tug a handcart full of no-name toilet paper through the folding doors to the sidewalk outside. Doug exited after her, feeling like a ghost, watching her climb into her car and check her mirror before backing up and pulling away.

  See? Nothing special, said the class-conscious part of himself—the thirty-two-year-old bachelor in him answering back, Yeah, right.

  Why he went on to tell Frank G. he might have met someone, he still didn’t know.

  And now here he was, back again, on foot this time, gazing up at her window. Mornings outside his mother’s house, nights outside hers: Since when had he become such a sad sack? Was this what he had kicked the juice for? To spend his Saturday nights standing in alleyways like a bashful thief?

  This was all he had ahead of him. You couldn’t even call it a dream. It was the opposite of a dream, and the opposite of a dream is not a nightmare but nothingness. Dead sleep. The Town was one big walk-in cooler, and her window up there, its yellow light, was the last cold one sitting on the shelf. The bottle he could not open; the one he was never to touch.

  HE WAS FLIPPING DROWSILY through Vette magazine and watching the cable rebroadcast of that afternoon’s Sox game when his door tapped sometime after 1 A.M. He walked barefoot in boxers and a T-shirt through the parlor that, one floor below, was Jem’s playroom, and below that, Jem’s mother’s old dining room, now the ground floor domain of Krista and Shyne.

  Prison time had left Doug with a meticulous, almost military appreciation for order—Jem called it fussiness—and his place reflected this. Clean house, clean life, clean mind. By choice, he never had visitors anymore.

  He stopped before the locked hall door and the shadow in the stripe of light beneath it.

  “Duggy.”

  Krista, her voice bar-hoarse and bourbon-hushed. The tapping became a fine scratching, and he could almost see her body leaning against the door, her ear pressed to it the same way she used to listen to his heart through his chest. Her hand would be close to her mouth, telling the door a secret.

  “I know you’re in there.”

  All the drinks he didn’t drink that night, all the mistakes he could have made but didn’t—coming back for him now. Picking at his door, one last chance.

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” she said. “Tell me why wanting you isn’t enough.”

  He lay his palm flat against the door, in the hope that some sort of current of understanding might pass between them. Then he turned off all the lights, passing by his sofa with her nail marks in the armrest, going to bed.

  8

  FRAWLEY AT THE TAP

  WHERE’D YOU GO?” asked Frawley.

  “Bathroom downstairs,” said June, hanging her bag on the stool back and easing his knee aside with her hand as she returned to her seat. “No line.”

  They sat together at a black Formica tabletop the size of a small steering wheel. The same people kept walking past.

  “There’s a downstairs?”

  “Sure. All the girls know it.”

  She had a lot invested in that word, girls, did June, a thirty-six-year-old Realtor whom Frawley had met one night at Store 24, she buying cream cheese, him size AA tape recorder batteries. They both lived in the navy yard, she in a water-view condo with glass furniture and indirect lighting, he in a highwayview, two-window sublet with milk-crate bookshelves and most of his clothes still in cardboard boxes. For some reason, being and remaining a girl was inordinately important to her, with streaked blond hair crowding both sides of her face, hiding—like a terrible family secret—the margins where lines and creases were starting to form.

  “You’ve never been here before,” she said twinklingly, ever amused.

  Frawley shook his head, still looking for the stairs.

  “But you’ve been to the Warren,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “Olives? Come on, you’ve at least been to Figs.”

  “I’ve walked past both.”

  “My God, Adam.” She put her hand on his wrist, like offering a prayer for his speedy recovery. “Do you know that I had reservations at Olives last weekend, nine o’clock—and it was still a forty-minute wait? When I moved here, in ’92—way ahead of the curve, by the way—there were only two restaurants I would even think of setting foot in, the Warren and the Tavern on the Water. Now look.” She gestured proprietarily at the room. “All this you see here—this is happening right now. This is the hot neighborhood, the South End of a few years ago. Only instead of gay men, now it’s single girls leading the charge.” Girls again, thought Frawley. “The only drawback is the negative stigma, with the gangsters and dockworkers and all that—which by the way is fading every week. This is boomt
own right now, I’m fielding a dozen calls a day from girls looking for apartments.” She sipped a fresh margarita, cleaning the salt off her lip with a small tongue, Frawley hearing Motley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” in his head. “Even Thai food now. That says all you need to know right there. Thai food in Charlestown? Run up the white flag.”

  Frawley nodding, still wondering where those stairs were.

  “There’s a new bistro and wine bar opening up next month—where the old Comella’s was? The space was vacant for almost a year. We’ll have to try it.”

  “Great,” he said, thinking, Uh, no.

  “And you have to take me running with you sometime. They say it’s great training for cardio-boxing.”

  Training for a workout class, that was something new. Frawley touched the “fun” margarita she had talked him into ordering. A bad experience in his freshman year at Syracuse—he had never before or again since vomited purple—had taught him never, ever to trust tequila. “So,” he said, “what was it that made you move here in ’92?”

  “Honestly? The parking. And now this whole neighborhood has exploded around me. My first place, before I bought in the yard, was over on Adams, this rickety condo with a girl who answered phones for Harvard Health. She lived in her pajamas all weekend and cried every Monday morning before work. Utterly manic, and I mean up until three in the morning painting walls. She had this absolutely dreadful, hopeless affair with one of the jerks who lived over us—got herself pregnant and was lucky that was all she got from him—then wanted me to go with her, you know, to get it taken care of, and I had to cross the protest lines with her, outside the clinic through all these crazy—what are you looking for?”

  “Oh. Nothing. Our server.”

  “He’ll be back,” she said, grabbing a strand of her streaked hair and twirling it. “But why do you live here, Special Agent Frawley?” She loved that. “Your commute sounds insane. It’s not really about the bank robbers, is it?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “You’re like some Sigourney Weaver observing the apes by living among them?”

  He deserved this for trying way too hard to impress her on their first date. “Just like that,” he said.

  “Because that’s all fading away. That meteor that killed off all the old dinosaurs? Coming down on this town like thigh-high boots with a thirty-foot heel. That’s girl power.” A shrill tone rang between them, barely audible. “Ah,” she said, a smiling frown, tugging her bag off the stool back and sliding out a flip phone, pulling up the antenna. “I was afraid this might happen.” She answered it, covering her opposite ear. “Hi, Marie.” Eye roll. “I can barely—hold on—” She covered the mouthpiece. “A client, signed a purchase-and-sale today, a two-bed with roof deck on Harvard, court parking, my exclusive. Needs some hand-holding.” She unfolded a pair of flat-framed specs and slid them on. “Two minutes, cross my heart.” She resumed the phone call. “Okay, Marie, June’s here…”

  Frawley excused himself and wandered through the crowd until he found the stairs near the entrance, a downward flight of beer-slicked, rubber steps without a sign. It looked like he was headed into the Tap’s storage basement until a twist cut off the clatter Upstairs, blending in laughter, yells, and music below.

  He came off the steps into a catacomb of brick walls and sticky stone floor. There was a short, dirty-mirrored bar, a jukebox pumping in the far corner, stacks of empty cases, a plastic-domed foosball table, and plenty of hothouse sweat. The music beat a blood pulse through the crowd, Frawley recognizing “Bullet the Blue Sky,” placing it somewhere around law school: faculty-student cocktail hours, driving his guacamole green diesel Rabbit to his FBI interview. The Joshua Tree album? Or Rattle and Hum?

  A fair-haired type in comically thick-rimmed eyeglasses was grooving at the jukebox, mimicking Bono’s midsong rap, “Peelin’ off those dollar bills / Slappin’ ’em down…” Then every voice in the room cheered as one:

  One hundred!

  Two hundred!

  Frawley noticed the tequila in his system now, tasting it in the sweat along his upper lip. This was where Frawley needed to be, not Upstairs with the smart set but underground, in the furnace room where the beast was nightly fed—the real Charlestown, the authentic Charlestown—Bono growling, “Outside it’s America…”

  The bump shocked him back into himself. It was a professional bump, almost a cop’s bump, making out Frawley’s service piece on the shoulder rig beneath his jacket.

  Frawley looked up, met the bumper’s eyes. They were bloodshot, the pupils a misty, near-white blue, close set. Those and the pronounced ridges beneath the bumper’s nose stuck out in Frawley’s mind: the memory of a face with a number board beneath it. A mug shot from the thick Charlestown files back at Lakeville.

  The stare went on, Frawley still digesting the pro bump as well as the mug, too stunned by it all even to begin competing with the bigger guy’s prison-yard stare. Downstairs not a full two minutes, and already he was made.

  “Jem, you’re up!” yelled someone—the bartender, turning the bumper’s head.

  The bumper grinned hard and angry. “Bathroom’s that way,” he said, shouldering hard past Frawley toward a quartet of beers opened and waiting on the bar.

  9

  THE GARDEN IN THE FENS

  AFTER BREAKFAST OUTSIDE HIS mother’s house on Sackville Street, Doug crossed the bridge into the city, bought a Herald and a Globe from a shaking, grizzled hawker outside the veteran’s shelter on Causeway, then piloted the Caprice up onto the expressway, riding south against the morning traffic.

  He spent much of the morning cruising suburban banks, trying to work up some enthusiasm for a low-margin score. He was looking for something he could control, something he could get them into and out of quickly and that would show a decent payday for their efforts—which was to say, the same thing any thief went looking for. Taking down scores was a game of momentum, and the Kenmore Square job had thrown them off their winning ways. They needed a nice medium-weight take to get back their confidence, and city banks were getting too complicated.

  He eyeballed a co-op in East Milton Square, a Bank of Boston on the Braintree–Quincy line, a credit union in Randolph—but nothing that lit up his switchboard. He tried to figure out if it was the size of the scores or his mood that was putting him off. Cash was out there, everywhere he looked: the trick was finding enough of it concentrated in one place, however briefly, to make a job worth the risk.

  ATM machines were cropping up all over, in bars, gas stations, even allnight convenience stores. These droids were fed by armored-car couriers making as many as fifty stops per day, sowing cash around metro Boston like uniformed Johnny Appleseeds. Unlike bank runs, ATM couriers never picked up cash, they only distributed, starting at the beginning of the day with a full whack and dropping between fifty and eighty grand at each jump, returning at end of day with only printouts and receipts. These couriers therefore had to be hit early, within their first few stops, and this had worked for Doug before, but now contractors were getting hip to the routine. They were showing more care early in their daily runs—using two-man deliveries, maintaining constant radio contact, even hiring out the occasional police escort—then easing off coverage after lunch.

  Convenience stores and the like took only twenties, usually from commercial armored trucks like Loomis, Fargo, & Co. or Dunbar—but their delivery times and routes varied due to demand, and there was no outside way for Doug to track that. Banks required tens as well as twenties—some of the downtown machines even took neat stacks of hundreds—distributed separately from branch deliveries, generally by unmarked armored vans with specially plated exteriors and bulletproof windows. But the bank bills were usually new and serialized—and therefore highly traceable.

  It had gotten to the point where Doug was willing to look beyond banks, but businesses doing even half their sales in hard cash were getting harder and harder to find. There were nightclubs, but that was often goombah
money, and stealing from the government was a lot safer than getting tangled up in a lot of spaghetti. Fenway Park had caught his eye during prep for the Kenmore job, but though he had enjoyed working out a scheme in his head, it was too much of a name job, “a marquee score” as Jem termed it, and good only for unending scrutiny and heat. Never mind being sacrilegious. Sometimes just knowing you can pull off a job is enough.

  What he had been looking at more and more were movie theaters. The big ones, the multiscreens. Only a portion of the ticket sales were done by credit card, and all the concessions remained strictly cash. As with ballparks, theater profits weren’t in their ticket prices. Food and drink were their main action. Theaters made most of their coin on the appetites of captive audiences, and big summer movies meant row after row of shiftless kids with nothing better to do than spend. The multiscreens lived off these opening weekends, and Monday mornings found them sitting as fat as a bank on Friday. Jump a can making a pickup, and maybe they’d have themselves something.

  But possibilities and probabilities, that was all he had. He scoped out a few movie houses on his way back into the city, just drive-bys, him trying to get his head together. Whether by accident or intent, his return route took him in past Fenway and over the turnpike bridge toward Kenmore Square.

  The Saturn was there in its regular space behind the bank, jumping out at him like something thrown at his windshield. The spike he felt in his chest was the same charge he got as a kid whenever he thought he spotted his mother in a crowd. For a year or more after she had disappeared, he’d faithfully cataloged his daily activities in a Scribble Pad, so that when she returned, he would be able to catch her up on everything about him she had missed.

  He banged a one-eighty around the bus station and cruised into the parking lot beneath the landmark Citgo sign, the same spot he had used to case the bank from, all the time wondering if there was a name for this virus he had. He thought he might just sit there awhile, watch the bank across the square.