The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  Doug checked the mirrors for tails. “You put in for next Tuesday off?”

  “Personal day, all set. But this decoy shit’s a lot of work.”

  “Tell that to the G. You switched trucks, I hope.”

  “Bleeding radiator—damn the luck. Here. Buckle this on.”

  Doug clasped around his waist a leather lineman’s belt just like Dez’s, with a red-orange plastic phone-company handset on a wire holster loop.

  Dez double-parked prominently on Yawkey Way, right across from the Gate D entrance, stepping out with his work-order clipboard and yanking open the back of the truck. He loaded Doug up with a pile of equipment, then they crossed the road and commiserated with the red-shirted gate girl about the heat. She consulted her clipboard. “Are you on the work list?”

  “Should be,” said Dez. “I know you’re on mine. I just go where I’m told.”

  Her red shirt meant ballpark staff, not security. “This is about the… ?”

  “System upgrades. All I’m here for now is to check things out, save us time on job day by making sure we bring everything we need. Something about everything having to be done over the next West Coast road trip. Twenty minutes, tops.”

  “Could I just see your work ID?”

  Dez showed her. She looked it over and filled out a work pass for him.

  Doug made a show of struggling under his load as she finished. “My trainee,” said Dez.

  “That’s okay,” she said, filling out a second pass without asking for Doug’s ID.

  The caves and tunnels beneath the Fenway stands, the concession area, was where the oldest park in Major League Baseball showed its age. Food-service workers wheeled racks of bagged hot-dog rolls to the stalls, already loading up for that night’s game. A blue shirt met them at the doors to an elevator, a recent college graduate, his security ID hanging on a shoelace around his neck, handset radio on his belt. He was short, wide with machine-pumped muscle, and Dez flashed him the passes.

  “Where to, guys?”

  Dez said, “Ah, press box, I’m told.”

  The blue shirt stepped aboard the elevator and pressed five. Doug stood between black-and-white photographs of prewar Ted Williams leaning on a bat and a beaming, Triple Crown–winning Carl Yastrzemski.

  Dez said, “Guess this ain’t gonna be the year, huh?”

  Blue shirt said, “Nope, doesn’t look like it.”

  When the elevator stopped, Dez said, “Anyone ever ridden in this thing with you and not said those basic words?”

  Blue shirt said, “You pretty much nailed it.”

  The doors opened on the sunny flat of an outdoor pedestrian ramp, the blue shirt leading them inside glass doors past an unmanned security desk, past back-to-back cafeterias—one for park employees, one for media—and down along a white hallway of doors open to broadcast booths. The end of the hall doglegged wide into two tiers of long counters, both of them print-media booths, resembling nothing so much as the old grandstand at Suffolk Downs. The glass wall looked out from just left of home plate, over the infield diamond of June-green grass, the cocoa base paths and warning track, thirty-four thousand tiny-ass seats, and the city of glass and steel beyond.

  “Field of screams,” said Dez, unloading Doug.

  They made a show of walking around and plugging things in, thumping on walls, the blue shirt lasting maybe three minutes. “Say, you guys good here for a while?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Dez, busy.

  “I’ll be back, couple of minutes.”

  Dez waved without looking. “Take your time.”

  When the footsteps faded, Dez slipped a radio wire into his ear, scanning for ballpark security frequencies. Doug affixed his work pass to his sweat-dampened shirt and nodded to Dez, starting quickly back out to the hallway, holding down his flopping telephone handset as he returned to the outdoor ramp.

  Doug walked down one floor, nodding to the white-aproned food service workers on their break, entering the first open door and finding himself inside the glass-enclosed 600 Club. He strode through it like he owned the place, passing only a carpet cleaner and a bar back, crossing behind the stadium seats and their fishbowl view of the park. An escalator brought him down one more floor to a concourse running high above the third-base seats, and he made his way down through the grandstand and loge boxes, ducking into the first ramp.

  Busy red-shirted Fenway employees passed him underneath the stands without much of a look. With the ballpark quiet and the concessions shuttered, Doug felt like he was back in his demo crew days—doing a basement sweep of a condemned building ahead of the wrecking ball. The angled stone floor was a skateboarder’s wet dream, the iron stanchions hoisting up the park like the corroding girders boosting the interstate over the Town.

  Doug passed behind Gate D, the red-shirted gate girl sitting out on the sidewalk, drinking from a bottle of water with her back to him. He passed a broad souvenir booth locked up like an old newspaper stand, eyeing the open red door beyond it. A sign on the inside face said Employees Only. Doug passed it with a long, careful glance, seeing a short hallway inside, leading to a second door with a square, one-way window.

  This was the money room. Game time always found a member of Boston’s finest working a detail outside it, but right now there were only cameras. According to the Florist’s inside squeal, the security work scheduled for the long road trip included surveillance upgrades, meaning the park’s central monitoring network would be dark for a few days. This was the reason for the job’s narrow timeline.

  The money room door was protected by an electronic keypad lock. Doug had the combination, but no intention of using it. He meant to grab the haul while it was on its way from the money room to the can, all packaged and ready to go.

  The snag there was that the cash pickup went down inside the closed park. The can was admitted through the ambulance bay door on Van Ness Street and loaded inside at the first aid station. That meant the job had to fall right there underneath the stands.

  He walked the tunnel between the money room door and the first aid station—park-wise, it matched up parallel with the distance between home plate and the edge of the outfield grass beyond first base—a brick-walled, advertisement-filled passageway with a low, slanting roof. Along this route the couriers wheeled the cash on a motorized handcart. Once loaded, the ambulance bay door opened again and the truck departed, making no other jumps before returning to the Provident Armored depot in Kendall Square.

  Doug lingered at the empty first aid area—just a kiosk inside the bay—eyeing the distance between iron girders, seeing how much floor space they’d have. Then he doubled back to the money room, checking the sight lines. He was stalling there, worrying about them becoming trapped inside the park, when the door opened.

  Doug turned and started away fast, back down the low tunnel toward the first aid station, making like he’d taken a wrong turn. A voice called to him, but he did not stop, fiddling busily with the handset on his belt.

  The voice called to him again, loud in the tunnel, enough to attract more attention. Doug stopped just a few paces from the first aid station, half-turning, still trying to shield his face from view.

  “Help you?” said the man, coming along behind him. A blue-shirt security guy, thin-haired and well-tanned, his radio still on his belt.

  “Nope, all set,” said Doug, still fooling with his handset. “Little lost in here.”

  “Hold up a minute.”

  The security guy came up, looked Doug over, his pass, his lineman’s belt and boots. The guy was older, in his fifties. Maybe head of security. “Come on with me.”

  He continued past Doug, and Doug followed, weighing his options. They turned left through the first ramp, out into the open air, walking along the field boxes in the lower stands down to the Red Sox dugout behind first base. Next to the dugout was a short door open to the field. The grounds crew was in the outfield spraying down grass and raking the warning track.

  “This what
you were looking for?” said the security guy.

  He wore a knowing smile, and Doug realized then this guy was trying to do him a solid. Give him a thrill, one working man to another. At Doug’s hesitation, the guy said, “Unless you throw a baseball ninety miles an hour, or hit one thrown that fast, this is your only chance to get out there.”

  Doug started onto the foul-territory dirt with the cautious first step of a ship passenger arriving on land. He crossed the grass, avoiding the freshly laid foul line as superstitious managers do, moving onto the infield. He paused before the pitcher’s mound, then walked up onto it, standing just shy of the rubber.

  He looked toward home plate with a bolt of fan vertigo. He found the press box high to his right, Dez standing in the wide viewing window, watching him, smiling in tribute, probably thinking, Duggy working the old magic, talking his way out onto the field.

  Doug looked out at the dinged tin of the Green Monster, then over it to the Citgo sign looming above Kenmore Square. The sight of that sign would forever kick him with a sense of failure, and of loss—the bank job, Claire—the city a boneyard of memories to him now, another good reason to walk away.

  He crossed back to the home team’s dugout like a pitcher headed for the showers. The security guy was leaning against the backs of the first row of seats, arms crossed, enjoying the gift more than the recipient had. “Still remember my first step out there.”

  “Hey, thanks,” mumbled Doug, concerned about the guy remembering his face now. Doug watched him close the little door to the field, saw the guy’s small, jeweled pinkie ring. He noticed the care the guy put into his fingernails, and the warm Florida vacation tan of his skin. Head of security, thought Doug, putting it together.

  “You like to gamble?” Doug asked him.

  The guy shrugged, a personal question but not too intrusive. “Here and there. Ponies mostly. Why?”

  “How much you into the Florist for?”

  The crash of the guy’s face. From lighthearted generosity to dead-eyed fear. He looked around, said quietly, “You’re not supposed to have any contact with me.”

  “Don’t vary your routine next Monday morning,” Doug told him. “Not one iota.”

  The guy glanced at the grounds crew, the empty stands behind him. “I was not to be approached.”

  “The cops’re going to approach you. They’ll be approaching everyone, after. You ready to sit for a lie detector?”

  The guy stared at Doug: a proud man in a panic, in deep debt to the Florist, nothing left to bargain with except his life. He turned and walked off underneath the stands, and Doug saw, as clear as the seams on a Wakefield knuckler, that the Florist would off this guy as soon as the job was done.

  ROOM 224 WAS IN the rear center of the block-deep, two-story Howard Johnson Hotel. With no direct sun and no cheerful amenities—just a humming TV, a mismatched chair and table, a stiff, yarny rug, a phone-booth shower, and a creaky double bed—the second-floor room was a suicide’s dream. Doug drew open the stiff, ratty curtain on a patchwork window with one pane tinted rose—and looked out across Van Ness Street to the southern exterior brick wall of Fenway Park.

  Fenway resembled a factory on that side, a long block of red brick and steel with small square windows made of glass as opaque as blocks of ice. Six old bay doors were widely spaced along the length of the wall, each painted green, all unlabeled except the one directly across the street from Doug’s window, the last before the canvas-lined fence of the players’ parking lot. Beneath a candle lamp with a red warning bulb, small, stenciled white letters on the green door read AMBULANCE.

  Doug changed out of Dez’s shirt and went right back outside again, crossing Boylston Street against the traffic, the hotel equidistant between the ballpark and the Fenway Gardens.

  He walked slowly to her gate. The vitality of the summer flowers stood in stark contrast to the cut stems that littered the Florist’s cooler tomb. Weeds were beginning to sprout in the neglected flower beds. Doug looked at the impatiens planted near his buried stash, ragged and thirsty and threatened by encroaching spearmint, wondering when she would return.

  DOUG SPENT THE EVENING in the suicide room, watching the park’s comings and goings before game time. The red bulb lit up two hours before the first pitch, the door rising and the ambulance backing carefully inside. Every bay door lifted in the eighth inning, the crowd soon flooding out onto Van Ness after a satisfying win, slow to disperse. The ambulance pulled away around the same time as the last of the players drove off in their Blazers and Infinitis, the red lamp going dark. The light towers above the park faded out a half hour later, and then it was just the homeless trawling for cans, pushing their shopping carts to nowhere.

  THAT NIGHT HE DREAMED he was crushed beneath the rear wheels of an armored truck, twelve tons cutting him in half. But it was not Frank G. removing his fireman’s helmet to take Doug’s hand—it was the bank sleuth, Frawley, his federal eyes smiling.

  A HORN BLAST FROM a passing truck woke him that morning—lying across the made bed, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He checked the clock, got up to take a piss, then pulled a chair to the window and waited.

  At 9:17 the red lamp went bright. The ambulance door opened as a silver Provident Armored can with twin rear doors pulled up, turning toward Doug before stopping and backing into the narrow bay. Doug saw the two guards in the cab, and knew that, given the size of the haul, a third had to be riding the jump seat inside the locked cargo hold. He noticed one other critical detail, getting a clear look down at their faces, shoulders, and chests from his second-floor window: neither guard wore ear wires. No need, he reasoned, given that the exchange took place behind locked doors.

  The can backed inside and the bay door closed. The red light above the closed door remained on.

  A second car, a black Suburban, pulled up onto the curb on Van Ness, stopping just to the right of the closed door and idling there. Doug watched the driver, apparently the only occupant, speaking into a handheld radio.

  A tail car. This complicated things.

  At 9:31 the ambulance door lifted again and the can rolled out, turning toward Yawkey and pulling away. As the bay door started to close, the black Suburban eased off the curb, following the truck, and Doug curled farther back from the window as it passed. The red lamp over the closed bay door went dark just as the lamp inside Doug’s criminal mind clicked on, suddenly illuminating the job before him.

  46

  THIRST

  DOUG TOOK THE ORANGE line out to the Community College stop and walked up the hill toward Pearl. The dilapidated house leaning on the slant looked a hundred years older since he’d last seen it. His Caprice and Jem’s blue Flamer were parked in front.

  He slipped inside through the unrepaired front door. Above all else he wanted to avoid seeing Krista. Up in his apartment, he went around filling his father’s old army sack with clothes. The only black shoes he owned were the pinching pair he had bought for his date with Claire, so he threw them in. When he realized he would never again return to the house, he made another quick, final pass. A convict’s personal possessions—few in number, weighted with significance—took on a totemic quality, and Doug had, over time, winnowed his meaningful totems down to exactly one. From the bottom drawer of his bureau, he pulled out his original draft letter, typed on Boston Bruins letterhead stationery and pressed in a clear plastic sleeve, slipping it into the bag.

  On his way back out, Doug paused on the steps below the second-floor landing. Jem’s door lock and frame remained busted. Doug walked back up, set his laundry bag down in the hall, and rapped a knuckle on Jem’s door.

  “It’s open,” he heard, and stepped inside. He started toward the game room, but Jem’s voice—“Down here”—turned him around, brought him into the bright front parlor.

  Jem wore a pit-stained, V-neck undershirt and black-and-gold, smiley-face boxers as he worked on the triple-decker dollhouse. He was interior-decorating it now, having pasted in old wallpap
er swatches and tiny curtains, furnishing it in miniature, even sitting a thin wooden Krista doll at the bottom-floor dining room table. Except for the empty third floor, the dollhouse was room-for-room an exact replica, inside and out.

  Jem had just finished his stereo and speakers—meticulous, down to the brand names, equalizer bars, tiny knobs—and was at work on his entertainment-center TV. “Heard you walking around up there,” he said without turning.

  “Yeah,” said Doug. “Clothes.”

  A bottle of Budweiser stood open on the table, soaking another ring into the ruined oak. “Where you been?”

  “Working this thing,” said Doug, pulling his eyes away from the Bud. “It’s coming together.”

  “Good to hear. You walking the can guards home at night?”

  “No,” said Doug. “I don’t do that anymore.”

  Jem put the tiny TV down to dry. “Tools are set,” he said, making a gun of his thumb and forefinger. “Got our armor. No masks needed with the uniforms.”

  “Gloansy get Joanie to clean those yet?”

  In the summer of 1993, Gloansy had worked as a driver on the set of one of the all-time worst motion pictures ever made, a Boston bomb-squad movie called Blown Away. The klepto had come through big time on that production, nabbing four cop uniforms out of a dressing room trailer, complete with badges, belts, and hats. Everything but the shoes. The costumes were so authentic that the theft was reported in the papers the next day, and Gloansy was questioned along with the rest of the film crew. He stashed the uniforms in his mother-in-law’s attic, where they had been cooling until that week.

  “I got yours here,” said Jem. “He had his bride do a little tailoring on them, so make sure your pants don’t have three legs. And he still needs to know what we want for a work car.”

  “Tell him I got that covered. Built into the gig.”

  Jem nodded without questioning it. They were quiet then, each pondering their uneasy truce. “Heard you’re thinking about leaving.”

  “Maybe. Yeah.”