The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  This was what brothers did. They watched each other’s back.

  In darkness he set out on his mission, soldiering through the night Town with the bag tucked under his arm. Crows and keening pterodactyls swooped down from the Heights, screaming over Bunker Hill Street. Voices spoke at him from doorways, alleys, corners. An impossibly ancient woman, older than the sidewalk, whispered to him, Take care of her for us, to which Jem replied telepathically, Ma’am, I will.

  Through Monument Square under the granite spike. Night creatures sailed around it on robe wings—the spirits of altar boys loosed from church attics—drawn to the heaven finger that was a radio tower broadcasting WTOWN, all day and all night, the reception strong and clear inside Jem’s head.

  Doug was getting ready to fly. Jem picked up his pace, the ocean roaring in his ears.

  Packard Street was the heart of the disease. The G was a cancer in the Town, Jem the fucking deliriant chemo. Jem, the sin eater, the avenging archangel.

  In the alley behind Packard he saw her glazed bathroom window, pushed open a few inches for him, just enough. Jem pulled on gloves, and with a glance up and down the alley, tucked the bag into his belt.

  He asked for invisibility. It was granted.

  Up onto her purple car without a sound, from its roof to the top of the dividing brick wall. He found a hand grip on the brick face of the sleeping building, the window within his reach now. It was old, like those in his mother’s house, hanging on clothesline pulleys, needing only a shove to rise.

  He asked for, and received, stealth, night vision, and cloaking silence. For a moment he hung two-handedly from the wooden sill—then he raised himself over it, crawling inside headfirst, being born into the room, coming to rest on the cold tile floor.

  The bathroom—the crotch in the body of the home. The kitchen was the heart; the bedroom the brain; the dining room the stomach; the living room the lungs. The front door its face; the garage its ass.

  The crotch was dark and cool. A steady dripping inside the porcelain bowl at his shoulder. The flower smells of night creams.

  His vision was good, and he untucked the paper bag from his waist, controlling the wrinkling noise. He pulled out the mask by its oval eye sockets, standing, fitting the black strap over the back of his head.

  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.

  Fuck you, Duggy. So fucking clever.

  In the sink mirror, the white Cheevers mask floated against the blackness of its eyes and graffiti scars.

  He emerged from the crotch into the lungs. Green digits of a stereo clock pulsing against the wall. A nightlight showing him the way.

  The door to the sleeping brain was closed. He gripped the knob with his gloved hand and entered.

  Streetlights gave him the room. Red clock digits quivering near the bed where she awaited him.

  His knee touched the side of the mattress as he stood over her, listening to her breathe.

  She sensed his presence. Her legs moved beneath the sheets. Her head turned under spilled hair, first finding the opened door. She brushed the hair back off her eyes. Then she saw.

  The face of the deliriant. She opened her mouth to scream.

  36

  WIRE

  DOUG SHOWED UP ON her doorstep with a plastic Foodmaster bag of groceries, feeling pretty good. There was a peculiar morning-after pleasure in having refused immediate gratification, in resisting his craving with an eye toward a greater design. This was the bedrock of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it occurred to him that this was also how religions were born.

  He found her door open a crack and felt a moment of concern, quickly mastered by rationalization. Lots of people in Town left their doors half-shut while running out for a quick errand. There would be a note on the table telling him that she had gone for more eggs, and to make himself at home.

  “Hey?” he said with a knock on the open door, moving inside. “It’s me.”

  Nothing. He moved down the hallway, telling himself it wasn’t danger he was sensing.

  “Claire?”

  She was standing in the living room, on the other side of the sofa between the coffee table and the stereo, wearing faded blue jeans and an untucked yellow T-shirt, a cordless telephone in her hand at her side.

  “Hey,” Doug said, stopping, feeling something in the air. “You know your door was open?”

  The way she was staring told him that she knew.

  “Why?” she said.

  Doug went numb. He set the grocery bag on the floor. “Why what?”

  “Is this a thing you do?”

  Something in him believed he could bluff his way out of this, even as it was all slipping away. “You talking about breakfast, or… ?”

  “Tearing women down and building them back up again?”

  The side of the sofa was as near to her as he dared move. His talk was pointless, but he wanted to keep on believing. “I brought bacon, I…”

  “Or was I some sort of bet? A contest maybe?”

  Something had happened since last night. Somehow she knew things now, and his instinct for self-preservation kicked in. The way she was standing at the back of the room with the phone. “Who else is here?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “No one,” she snapped. “Not anymore.”

  Frawley. The kitchen was empty. Doug stepped to her bathroom, sweeping aside the shower curtain on the wide open window. He crossed to her bedroom, also empty.

  Doug’s defeat found an outlet in fury. “What did you tell him?”

  She hadn’t moved, watching him. “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  A trap. The plan was to draw him into apologizing his way through a confession, him explaining himself right back into prison. The microphones could be anywhere.

  He reached for her stereo, the CD player, turning it up loud. Smashing Pumpkins music filled her condo, all gunning guitar and bald-boy thrashing.

  Her eyes went dark as he advanced. “Stay away from me,” she said, backing up a step, raising the phone antenna-first. “I’ll call the police.”

  Doug lunged for her and grabbed the phone, ripping it out of her hand, whipping it across the room at the sofa.

  She froze, stunned.

  With the music blasting, he pushed her up against the wall and shut his hand over her mouth, his callused palm catching her scream. He felt down both sides of her chest, her belly and her waist, groping her through her shirt.

  Her voice was smothered, eyes wide. She tried to fend him off but he pinned her near arm to the wall with his elbow, working fast.

  He reached beneath her shirt, sliding his fingers around the waist of her jeans. Then up her abdomen to the satin band linking the cups of her bra. Her free hand gripped his wrist, trying to stop him from going there. He pushed his fingers underneath the center strap, exploring her cleavage, finding no wires.

  His hand came out of her shirt with Claire still gripping his wrist. He was too strong for her, reaching around for the small of her back, feeling nothing through her jeans there, then sliding his hand along the insides of both thighs, feeling up her inseam to her crotch.

  Nothing. No battery pack, no wire.

  She stared into his face, her hand still fighting his wrist. Then he eased off, realizing what he had just done. “I had to see if you were wired,” he told her. “I had to—”

  She jerked her knee up, hitting him in the thigh, just missing his balls. She went at him, slapping and whacking, and he let her. Her barefoot kicking didn’t have much behind it, but the cracks across his face hurt. He defended himself without fighting back, eventually retreating a few steps.

  She screamed, “You go to fucking hell!”

  “It’s not what you think.” What could he say to her? “Whatever he told you—”

  “I fucking hate you!”

  “No.” He shook that off, he refused it.
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  She looked for something to throw at him, found the AM Gold disc he had loaned her, cracked it off his elbow. Then she struck out at her blaring stereo, shoving it twice before it crashed to the floor—and even then, the music still played. Not until she ripped the plug out of the wall did the tune die.

  Doug talked fast. “The robbery—whatever you know is true. But since then—I don’t know what happened. All I can think about is you.”

  “You Townie gym-head… asshole… convict… fucking street trash…”

  He stood up to all of this.

  “What?” she said, wild-eyed, fixing her bra through her shirt. “Did you think you were going to come over here this morning and make me breakfast and fuck me? Tell all your friends?”

  He shook his head, mouth closed tight.

  “Making me feel sorry for you,” she said.

  He exploded. “Sorry for me?”

  His rage shocked her. A long moment of brittle defiance, then she cried like she was vomiting tears into her hands. “Why would you do this to me?” she wailed. “Why would you do this to anybody?”

  What could he tell her? I am in love with you? I want to go away with you?

  “You knew last night,” he said. “At the ballpark—you knew. Yet it was all right. You wanted me back here.” He opened his hands down at his sides. “Why not now?”

  She caught her breath, sniffling, bringing her hands away from her raw face. Defiant again. “I guess your friend refreshed my memory.”

  Doug’s blood rose again. “Is that what Agent fucking Frawley calls me? His friend?”

  She stood still, breathing. “What?”

  Doug could not disguise the look of murder on his face. “What else did he say?”

  “Frawley? It wasn’t Frawley.” She smiled crazy. “It was your friend in the hockey mask.”

  Hockey mask. Doug stared at her, confused. “What?”

  Claire crossed the room to retrieve her phone from the sofa.

  Doug shook his head but couldn’t feel anything. He looked to her bathroom, the window she kept open. He looked at her open bedroom door. “He what?”

  Hockey mask. Open window.

  “I want you to go,” she said.

  Jem. Doug looked her up and down. “Did he touch you?”

  She held the phone poised to dial. “He warned me not to go to the police, but so help me God, if you don’t get the hell out…”

  Doug shook his head, staving off hysteria. Jem’s lips on her lemonade straw. “Did he touch you?”

  She had tears again, and Doug stared, looming before her, fists at his side. “Out,” she told him. “Of my house. Of my life.”

  Her words drove him back a step. “Claire. Wait—”

  “Don’t you ever fucking speak my name again.” She held out the phone with her thumb over the numbers. “If you make me call, I will tell them everything.”

  He stepped back again, the phone like a gun in her hand. “All I ever wanted—”

  She pressed her thumb down. “Nine.”

  “Don’t do this.”

  “You better run now.” She pressed again. “One.”

  He was going to stay. He was going to face whatever came.

  Then she lost it, screaming at him, “Get out!”—backing him down the hall to the front door by the sheer force of her emotion—“Get out!”—shaming him down the steps and out alone onto Packard Street.

  37

  A BEATING AND A MEETING

  THE OLD DOOR GAVE in like it had been waiting years for someone to put a good shoulder to it. Doug brushed past the cardinal’s picture and the holywater bowl to Jem’s game room, where the stereo was on, the CD long over, the volume turned way up on nothing, speakers emitting a dry auditorium PA hum. The couch of green leather was empty.

  Seeing the plastic tea bag underneath the glass coffee table was like finding the last piece to a jigsaw puzzle Doug didn’t even know he was working on. If he had been paying closer attention, he wouldn’t have needed that one final piece to make out the complete image.

  The late-night music. Jem’s disappearances, his raccoon life. The camo kids. His dukes to Fergie.

  Doug tore back down the hall, banging open Jem’s bedroom door along the way and whipping blankets off the heap of cushions Jem called a bed. Then into the front parlor and its bow windows with torn screens overlooking Pearl Street. Jem’s woodworking tools were laid out on sheets of newspaper, and there, atop an old end table, stood a nearly completed dollhouse. It was a scale replica of that very same triple-decker, all three stories with the western wall cut away. Doug lifted his boot to crush it, but some small voice of mercy told him the house was a gift meant for Shyne. Instead he kicked over a standing lamp and stomped in its head.

  Then he heard the familiar revving of the overtuned engine and went to the center window. The Flamer was pulling up curbside on the street below. Doug was downstairs and outside in a flash.

  Jem smiled his broad, Joker-faced grin as Doug strode toward him, the grin fading just as he saw Doug’s fist coming around—no telegraphing it, no buddyboy slo-mo—Doug tagging his chin with a “Fucking motherfuck!” and Jem banging off the trunk of his car and rolling into the gutter. A shopping bag spilled out of Jem’s hand, little paintbrushes and tubes of modeling paint and wood glue tumbling into the street.

  “Chrissst!” said Jem, getting up on his knees and touching his mouth, his fingers coming away bloody.

  “You kept your mask, you fucking psycho—” Doug kicked him under his shoulder, high on his ribs, bouncing him against the bumper of his car.

  “Wait. What?” Jem was back up on one knee. “Hold it. Duggy. Hold it.”

  Then Jem sprang at him from a crouch, burying his neck and shoulder in Doug’s midsection and running him back across the sidewalk, slamming him hard against the clapboard siding of the house.

  Doug took a fist to the hip. He hammered Jem’s back, trying to throw him off, but Jem anticipated this and shifted his weight as Doug tried to muscle him around, Doug falling ass-first to the slanting sidewalk.

  Jem was on top of him now, head still buried in Doug’s gut, arms swinging strong. A hockey fight, Doug with Jem’s shirt almost up over his head, the freckled spray of his back exposed.

  “Fucking duster!” shouted Doug. “How you stayed up all night after the wedding, huh? Why you shot up the place? I pulled a job with a fuhhh—”

  Jem landed a shot on Doug’s kidney. He was working hard, wrestling his way up Doug’s chest, a lot bigger and stronger than he used to be. With just a little more leverage, Jem would have him pinned.

  Doug was losing this fight. If Jem got up onto his chest, Jem would hammer him into the sidewalk.

  Doug reached under him and grabbed Jem’s belt with one hand, his shoulder with another. In a burst of righteous fury, Doug used all his strength to lift Jem off his chest, the dust-head’s work boots kicking in the air as Doug boosted him up and over, Jem coming down hard on his shoulders and back, Doug rolling away free.

  Jem scrabbled to stand but Doug was up and running at him, grabbing shirt and shorts and ramming him headfirst into a neighbor’s pickup. Dented and dazed, Jem tried to kick backward at Doug’s balls, but Doug caught the boot and spun him around, grabbing him up and teeing off, landing a good hard punch, undeflected, in Jem’s face.

  His nose burst its blood and Jem crashed back onto the hood of a car, sliding down off the corner headlamp and dumping onto the street in a heap.

  There he lay, squirming on his belly, holding his face with both hands. Doug stood over him, head roaring from the madness of savagery and the earlier fall to the sidewalk. The wet things in his eyes: they were tears.

  “Get up.”

  Jem rolled over, curling in pain. Blood hung in snotty ribbons from his chin and a gash had opened over his nose, street sand matted in the bloodstain on his cheek. “Did it few, man,” he said.

  “Get up.”

  “I did it few.” His words came out in gob
s of bloody drool. “Did it fuss. Why her, man? All udder chicks in a world. Why?”

  “Get up, Jem, so as I can knock you the fuck down again!”

  “Fuckin’ who you better ’an? You better ’an me?”

  Onto his knees. Far enough. Doug tagged him in the chin and Jem dropped back, sprawling.

  Jem smiled now, bloody-toothed, lying there in the street. “Din’t even touch’er, man. Jest a warning. I true her back. Small fiss.”

  “Good for you. Then you’ll live.”

  Jem wanted to sit up but his ribs wouldn’t let him. He rolled to his side but couldn’t get up that way either, so he gave up and lay back, grinning up at the sky.

  It wasn’t enough for Doug. He bent down and grabbed Jem’s bloody shirt, lifting him off the road. Jem’s white eyes lolled as he smiled at Doug’s fist.

  “Why ’on’t you hit yousself,” said Jem. “Jest fucking hit yousself.”

  Doug wanted one more. He wanted it bad. But he feigned it first, and Jem didn’t flinch, his eyes cloudy like dishwater.

  Doug let him drop. Jem coughed, giggling as he bled. “’Appily ever after,” he muttered.

  Doug walked away unsatisfied, a dark cloud carrying a massive electrical charge, still needing release.

  Krista was out on the sidewalk. She had stood there and watched her brother get the Irish kicked out of him—and remained there still as he lay muttering and giggling in the street. She looked at Doug, taking a step toward him—but Doug was already starting away up the slope, hands aching, ears roaring, half-blind with despair.

  FRAWLEY’S SUBLET CAME WITH a parking space in a low-ceilinged garage just off First Avenue, the main road bisecting the decommissioned Charlestown Navy Yard. On the land side of First stood the old brick shipbuilding factories, including an obsolete ropewalk building a quarter mile long. On the water side stood the redesigned wharves, brick foundries that had been carved into waterfront two-bedrooms. The redeveloped yard was more campus than neighborhood, skewing predominantly toward successful single professionals. Frawley imagined the old dockworkers and longshoremen coming back from the grave to find their stomping grounds turned into a community of high-rent condos populated by the young, the clever, the uncallused.