The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  The ninety-minute commute home from Lakeville had nested in Frawley’s lower back, and he stood out of the dread Tempo, both hands on its roof, stretching the pain away. He was examining the car’s fading blue finish—gray spots spreading across the roof like mold—when he heard footsteps coming up behind him, hard and thudding, like boots. Frawley instinctively reached inside his jacket before turning.

  MacRay was empty-handed, unshaved, and hungover-looking in a faded gray T-shirt and jeans, moving fast through the sulfurous light.

  Frawley gripped the butt of his SIG-Sauer 9mm but did not draw, and MacRay stopped within an arm’s reach, breathing hard, homicide in his eyes.

  Frawley was shocked and trying to conceal it. Pulling his gun would have been prideless. He slid his creds out of his breast pocket instead, folded them open.

  “Special Agent Frawley, FB—”

  MacRay swatted the billfold out of Frawley’s hand. It fluttered like a wounded bird and dropped to the concrete a few feet away.

  Frawley’s heart fell just as fast. The rudeness of the act, its near childishness, settled on his face like a dark pair of sunglasses, helping him move past fear.

  “Don’t make a mistake here, MacRay,” said Frawley. “I want to take you down, but not for this.”

  MacRay stared, more controlled than Frawley had first thought. He looked past Frawley with expert distaste. “Upgraded to the Tempo, huh? Nice ride.”

  Frawley fought off questions: How long had MacRay been on him? How had MacRay known he would be here?

  MacRay said, “Know what happened to me? Some fucking douche bag keyed my Vette. You believe that shit?”

  Frawley saw the emerald green car parked along the wall, saw its long silver scar.

  “Fucking with a man’s ride, that’s some cowardly-ass shit, don’t you think?” MacRay went on. “I mean, what do you call someone who would do a thing like that, huh? A punk? A pussy?”

  Frawley said, “I take it she dumped you.”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  Frawley worked up a smile. “How long did you think that was going to last? What was your play there, MacRay?”

  “You don’t know nothing about it.”

  “Reminds me of smokehead ATM jumpers. Password thieves, they get the secret code, they think they can ride that card forever.” Frawley then noticed MacRay’s open, anxious hands—the crook’s knuckles cut, swollen like walnuts. Frawley said, “If you laid a hand on her—”

  “Fuck you,” said MacRay, dismissing him with a wave. It was convincing, but Frawley would have to check on Claire Keesey himself to be sure.

  MacRay backed off a little, walking in a tight, agitated circle like a dog in a cage, while Frawley stood in repose.

  “Like your sponsor there,” said Frawley, pushing back at him now. “Fire-fighter Frank Geary. The wife-beater, trying to school me. You reformed drinkers, you’re the worst.”

  MacRay came back at him hard, pointing. “Listen to me. You stay the fuck away from him, got that? Who’s this between? You want to know something about me? Here I am. What?”

  Frawley held his composure. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “’Course not. You’d rather go slinking around, talking to everybody else but me. Who had the balls to face who? Fucking little dink.”

  “You came here to call me names, MacRay?”

  “Just thought I’d swing by, introduce myself personally.”

  “Damn neighborly of you.”

  “Strip away some of this bullshit between us. This dance.”

  Frawley said, “I’m not dancing.”

  “Yeah? Me either.” MacRay looked out through the open walls of the garage to the lights along First Avenue. “What you think, you’re undercover here? You think you live in Charlestown? The yard ain’t Charlestown. You got no idea what’s going on.”

  “I know plenty.”

  MacRay squinted, taking Frawley’s measure. “So what is this? This about her?”

  Frawley frowned him a fuck you. “This is about a bank.”

  “Yeah.” MacRay turned away, his circular pacing again. “Sure it is.”

  “About a movie theater too.”

  “Movie theater?” MacRay cocked his head like he might not have heard that right.

  “You fucked up, MacRay. You and your crew.”

  MacRay continued his circuit. “You lost me back at the movie theater thing.”

  “Surprised me, that. Armored-truck heisting with the crusts cut off. A soft job. Maybe you’re gun-shy. Maybe you’re a little more afraid of me catching up with you than you’d like to admit.”

  Frawley was inside his head with a bullhorn, MacRay walking faster, mad.

  “Struck me that maybe,” Frawley went on, “maybe this was a job pulled by someone thinking about getting out. Even hanging it up for good. For the love of a good woman, perhaps. I’m thinking it’s fifty-fifty you came here tonight to tell me good-bye.”

  MacRay slowed then, denying Frawley the explosion he expected. “She doesn’t want you, man,” MacRay told him. “Nothing you can do will change that.”

  Frawley grinned away a chill. “Yeah, she’s Helen of Troy. She’s the Mona Lisa. I mean, she’s nice, MacRay, she’s all right. Got all her teeth. But why her? Careful guy like you. A vic from one of your own jobs? What made you cross that line?”

  MacRay stared.

  “Wait—was it love? That it, MacRay?” Frawley’s taunting smile bloomed and died. “What made you think it would ever work?”

  “Who’s saying it’s over?”

  Frawley smiled wide at his bluff. “Oh, it’s not?”

  MacRay said, “Nothing is.”

  Frawley grinned, stopping himself from saying Good.

  “What’s so funny, sleuth?”

  “Funny?” Frawley shrugged. “Us standing here. Chatting.”

  It had gone on too long, them standing there together, Frawley’s anxiety building.

  MacRay said, “You know how in movies, cop and robber, they spend the whole picture matching wits and end up with this grudging respect for each other? You got any grudging respect for me?”

  Frawley said, “I have not one ounce.”

  “Good. Me fucking either. I just didn’t want you to think we’d be holding hands at the end of this.”

  Frawley shook his head. “Not unless you count handcuffs.”

  MacRay took his measure once again. “If you did get a fingerprint—it wasn’t mine.”

  She had warned him. Frawley burned. “You’re a dead end, MacRay. Maybe you should just walk away for good, you’re so afraid to go up against me.”

  MacRay came close to a smirk then, and Frawley knew he had him locked in—then MacRay started back to his car, and Frawley wasn’t so sure.

  “I’ll see you around then,” Frawley called after him.

  “Yeah,” said MacRay, opening his car door and climbing inside. “Yeah, maybe.”

  PART IV

  A SORT OF HOMECOMING

  38. Excalibur Street

  39. Linger

  40. Mac’s Letter

  41. Birthday

  42. The Last Breakfast

  43. The Florist

  44. Depot

  45. Ballpark Figure

  46. Thirst

  47. Getaway

  48. Night Crawlers

  49. The Suicide Room

  50. The Dime

  51. The Mourning Of

  52. The Last Job

  53. Home

  54. End Beginning

  38

  EXCALIBUR STREET

  MRS. KEESEY ANSWERED THE front door in a designer running suit, the Round Table Estates’ version of the 1950s housecoat. Theirs was one of the few screen doors in the world that did not squeal when opened. “Thank you, Mrs. Keesey, for letting me stop by in the middle of the day,” said Frawley, stepping inside the chilly foyer.

  “Quite welcome,” said Mrs. Keesey, looking out at his moldy Tempo cluttering up Excalibur Stree
t, then closing the heavy door. She stepped to the balustrade, where bank statements and investment prospectuses in sliced envelopes were filed between egg-white banister spindles. “Claire!” she sang out, then looked at Frawley with a nonsmile. “She’s back with us again. I don’t know what brought this on.”

  She eyed the manila envelope in his hand suspiciously, as though it contained information on her. The odor of whiskey on her breath was like a premonition of early death.

  “Can I offer you some spring water?” she said, studied and formal, an actress bored in her long-running role as wife and housemother.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.”

  Claire Keesey came down the stairs in a white T-shirt and even whiter sweatpants, greeting Frawley without expression—Mrs. Keesey already withdrawing to the kitchen.

  Claire took him the other way, her white socks whispering across a smooth maple floor, through French doors into her father’s home office, just as before. This time Claire sat behind the desk, puffy-eyed from crying, but not bruised or battered. MacRay’s swollen hands had beat up somebody, but not her.

  Frawley sat in the college rocking chair, eyeing her, harboring feelings he was not proud of. Triumph. Satisfaction. Also pity.

  “You made a mistake,” he said, magnanimous in victory. “A misjudgment.”

  She picked at her fingers, ashamed, sullen.

  “I wish you hadn’t gone through this,” he said, and meant it. “And I wish we didn’t have to do this now.”

  Frawley opened the envelope flap and slid out four photographs, playing the mugs out on the desk blotter like a winning hand. MacRay’s cocky black-and-white was top right. She locked on it, her eyes showing hurt.

  “Okay,” said Frawley. “Know any of the others?”

  She took in each, lingering an extra moment on nasty-eyed Coughlin and his jerk smirk.

  “No?” said Frawley. He pulled another photograph from his envelope and placed it down in front of her. It was a still developed from Gary George’s wedding video: an off-angle image of Kristina Coughlin in a black dress, sitting next to MacRay in a tuxedo at an otherwise empty table, drinks before them. “What about her?”

  Claire stared, confusion giving way to a defiant blankness. She asked no questions. She didn’t even shake her head.

  Frawley was just trying things here. He laid down a blurry, retouched, six-year-old surv photograph of the reclusive Fergus Coln, the Florist wearing a dark sweatshirt hood and apparently pointing out the telephoto lens. “What about this man?”

  She squinted at the murky image, rejecting it immediately.

  “Have you ever been inside MacRay’s place?” Frawley asked.

  No answer, but it didn’t look like she had.

  “Ever seen him handling large amounts of cash? Or talking about a particular hiding place? Ask you to hold or hide anything for him?”

  Her silence answered no.

  “Did he ever admit anything to you or implicate himself in any way? How did you finally find out about him?”

  Now her silence seemed like something greater than mere recalcitrance.

  “Look,” said Frawley. Her hand was on the desk and he reached out and squeezed it reassuringly. “I’m sure your sense of trust is pretty tender right now.”

  She looked at his hand on hers, pulled away. “How long did you know?”

  Frawley withdrew his empty hand. “Not long.”

  “But long enough,” she said. “When you came to see me that day—you were carrying that same envelope.”

  Frawley shrugged. “I might have been carrying an envelope.”

  “Were you… punishing me?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Did you want me humiliated? Because I chose him and not you? Is that why you didn’t tell me?”

  Frawley shook his head adamantly, not in answer but in retaliation. “You don’t get to do this. Don’t look at me like I’m the one who seduced and betrayed you. Like I’m the one who made you a fool.”

  She went silent, and Frawley knew he had been too harsh. He eased off.

  “You’re angry,” he said. “You’re feeling betrayed. I understand these things. But don’t take it out on me. I wanted to help you. No big deal, but I was here for you. And you chose badly. It happens, people make mistakes. And now you know.”

  She was looking down—not at the photos, not at him.

  “What you need to do now,” he went on, “is turn your anger where it belongs—on them.” He knocked on the blotter of pictures. “With your help we can put these assholes away for a long time.”

  She went into her sweatpants pocket and brought out a business card, handing it to him. The first thing Frawley noticed was the icon of the scales of justice printed in the lower-left corner.

  “This is my lawyer,” Claire said. “If you want to talk to me again, you do it through her.”

  Claire punched the her. Frawley read and reread the card, the saliva in his mouth turning bitter.

  “Lucky,” he told her, slowly collecting his photographs from the desk blotter. “Lucky for you I don’t need you much anymore, or else this would get very unpleasant.” He took MacRay’s mug last, reviewing the cocksure face once more himself before returning it to the envelope. “Why didn’t I tell you you were being sweet-talked by the guy who kidnapped you? Because I needed to keep MacRay close. Because this is a federal criminal investigation, not fucking Love Connection.”

  “You can go now.”

  “Here’s the deal, Ms. Keesey. MacRay is going to come back to see you again.”

  “No, he’s not—”

  “And when he does,” Frawley talked over her, “and when he does—any contact you have with him, any conversation whatsoever, you will report it to me. Either yourself or through your lawyer”—he flicked at the business card—“or else you will be looking at a criminal prosecution yourself. That is not a threat, that is a promise. This is a felony case I am investigating, and any unreported contact between yourself and the suspect will be prosecuted.”

  He stood, pocketing her lawyer’s card, still pissed.

  “You think you feel humiliated now? How about going on trial for aiding and abetting an armed felon? How about putting this whole affair out there for the entire world to see? ‘Bank Manager Falls for Armed Robber’—how’s that sound? You like reading tabloids? Want to be in one?”

  He stopped himself there, opening the French doors.

  “Yeah, it’s rough, but you brought this on yourself. I can’t help you if you won’t let me. MacRay will come to you again. And when he does, you will tell me.”

  39

  LINGER

  WHAT IT FEELS LIKE, being underwater.

  Krista was there, finally. Submerged. The Tap Downstairs a brick aquarium tank now, the bourbon in her system giving her gills.

  Everything slower. Sounds reaching her late, stretched out so that she could mull them over or just let them pass her by. Life becoming fluid, languid. She reached her hand to the bar and met the resistance of the water, the push starting a ripple. Every movement began a current and left a wake. A twist of her head tipped the balance of the room, everything lifting then settling back into place again, the sounds lagging behind, a moment or two before finding her ears in their new position. One thing flowing beautifully into the next.

  Alone at the bar in the center of the liquid universe. Fuck you, Mrs. Joanie Magloan. The former Joanie Lawler always used to love to say, Shit, what you think, I’m gonna be one of those married girls who stops going out? This was before she kissed the freckled frog prince Magloan and got turned magically into a housewife. Two nights ago Krista called her—Sorry, Kris, can’t make it. So tonight, Krista didn’t even bother trying her. S he’ll put in a call to her tomorrow—you bet—letting it slip out that she hit the Tap without her, because that was psychology. Making her think she’s missing out was what would get her ass in gear next time. Not Krista being the single girl, begging.

  The
music was a pleasant warble. No U2 without the Monsignor there tonight—her Pope, her grateful Pope. His cock crowed three times—so gratefully—each crow a stab of betrayal at Duggy, and now she couldn’t get him on the phone. Hiding away in the Forgotten Village, his Vatican City.

  A dollar bill from her jeans pocket—her last. Undulating in her hand like a waving fern. Her shoes touched the floor, a swimmer walking across colored rocks on the bottom of the night-lit Tap aquarium, toward the wall of brick coral, the jukebox a treasure chest opening and releasing bubbles. Three bubbles for a dollar. She punched in the same code three times, The Cranberries, “Linger.”

  Swimming back, she pretended to snub the guy who had been checking her out all evening. So check this out, she thought, moving slow, giving him the full view.

  Splashy was always good for one on the house, but she liked to know she still had the power, especially now as she felt it starting to fade. They say the day your baby starts living is the day you start dying, and if they were right, then she had been wasting away for twenty-one months now.

  Twenty-one months was the average life span (she remembered Duggy telling her this once—she remembered everything he told her) of a one-dollar bill in circulation. Fifties and hundreds, they lasted the longest.

  I am wanted. I have currency. She was a clean, firm bill, no longer quite so crisp, but still negotiable legal tender. Maybe not a C-note anymore, but definitely a fifty.

  She regained her seat and waited for the ripples to subside and her vision to clear. He was stirring now. Hooking his Bud bottle by the neck and walking it over, pulled by the tide.