The Town: A Novel

by Chuck Hogan

  He had expected the crew to keep their distance from each other in the runup to the heist, but he should have been seeing a lot more prep activity in and around the target—especially with Elden’s day off from work just three days away.

  Krista Coughlin had hung up on Frawley twice. He worried that he had overplayed his hand with her, that she had gone to MacRay after Frawley’s initial contact, maybe scared him off this mark.

  Cray tapped a pencil against the dash in time with the techno music, using the passenger seat as a desk upon which to read the case file. “Explosives, huh?”

  “It’s a theory,” said Frawley.

  “Three turnpike exits. This thing was made-to-order.”

  Frawley nodded, then sat back against the van wall, thinking. He was quiet and still so long that Cray stopped tapping and looked over. “Ever play any hockey?” Frawley asked him.

  “You kidding? I grew up in northern Minnesota, closer to Winnipeg than Minneapolis. You?”

  “I ran track. Played a little basketball. Not being six-six, I used to have to fake a lot. Do you fake much in hockey?”

  “Sure, all the time.” Cray moved his pencil over the file like a hockey stick. “You’re on a breakaway, say. You and the goalie, one-on-one. You’re charging in hard, he centers himself, stick down, elbows out. You draw back on a slap shot, bring the blade hard on a fake. The goalie commits. You’ve frozen him. You flip a little wrist shot past his skate—and the hometown crowd goes wild.”

  Frawley nodded, buzzing. After a moment he pushed open the back doors of the van and stood out on the dirt shoulder of the road. He looked at the double-fenced Magellan Armored Depot, and then to the turnpike overhead, the cars shooting into the city, thinking, And the hometown crowd goes wild.

  49

  THE SUICIDE ROOM

  THIRTY-FOUR THOUSAND SEATS. Times three sold-out games.

  Equals one hundred thousand mouths.

  Saturday and Sunday matinees, loads of kids in attendance: multiple Cokes, beers, ice cream; on top of programs, T-shirts, caps, souvenirs.

  Round it off. Say $25 average per mouth. Times one hundred thousand.

  $2.5 million.

  Adjust up for day-of-game cash ticket sales, down for coins—call it even.

  Subtract Fergie’s greedy 40 percent, then divide by four.

  Seven minutes of work = approximately $400K.

  AROUND NOON WAS THE only time he left the room on Sunday. Walking the perimeter of the park before the game was the bare minimum of what he needed to do in terms of prep, and he kept his eyes off the taverns, cutting it short at the end to hustle back to 224, convinced that Claire would be there waiting for him. At the very least, there would be a message from her flashing on his phone.

  Nothing. He went through the whole lifting-the-receiver thing, making sure the telephone was working, then walked to the front desk to double-check that no messages had been left, then raced back to the room hoping the phone hadn’t rung in the meantime.

  Around about the third inning he started to pretend he wasn’t nervous. He opened the only hinged pane on his window and listened to the crowd noise across Van Ness, the game playing on his TV with the sound down. He paced. At one point he saw a female beat cop out on the sidewalk, and Doug pulled the shades, watching out of the window edge as the cop passed under the red light over the closed ambulance door. She turned the corner and never came back, and Doug told himself that it was exactly what it had looked like: a cop walking a beat. Not a uniform scouting out his room.

  Claire would never dime him out to the G. He had offered her the chance to put him away only because he knew she couldn’t do it.

  It was the room that doubted her. The squalid little suicide room telling him that opening himself wide to Claire had been a mistake. Doug telling the room, Fuck you.

  Again and again he reviewed their encounter in her garden. If only she had told him to stop. Stop, for me. And he would have. He would have called off this job and walked away without a regret. He had come too far to risk their future together on one final score. Claire Keesey was his one final score. All she had to do was come to him now.

  He clung tight to this ideal of her, but as the hours passed, his faith began to pale.

  A burst of noise and movement outside his window brought him back to the sash, crouching. But it was only the game letting out. He stood like the fool that he was and walked the room, pacing back and forth past the telephone, the afternoon growing short.

  AROUND SIX, DOUG TRIED on the uniform in front of the bathroom door mirror. With his size and haircut, he made a good cop. Too good—the mirror cop looking at him like this was a big mistake Doug was making.

  Doug took the uniform off and walked the room in his underwear. Had Claire forgotten the name on the register? Somehow confused hotels?

  The impulse to call her was strong and wrong. Not even from a phone booth; they had her tapped for sure.

  He checked the view hole in his door for the umpteenth time, imagining Frawley and a SWAT team of federal agents setting up around the hotel, evacuating it room by room.

  He thought food might make him feel better, but by the time the Domino’s guy arrived after eight, Doug was crackling with paranoia, studying the guy for cop traits, paying him quick and getting him out of there. He set the pizza box on top of the TV and never even raised the lid.

  TEN O’CLOCK, HE WAS under a burning-hot shower trying to chase the crawlies away when he thought he heard knocking. He shut off the water and stood there listening to his dripping for a few, precious seconds, then grabbed a towel and walked damp to the door, opening it to the hallway.

  A woman stood in the middle of the corridor three doors down, turning fast to the sound of the opening door. It was Krista, not Claire, with Shyne a dead weight on her hip.

  Doug was too empty to say anything. He didn’t move from the doorway, Krista coming before him, looking past his shoulder into the room, Shyne blinking slow-eyed against her chest. “Have any juice or milk or anything?” She held up Shyne’s empty bottle. “I’m out.”

  He backed away, moving into the bathroom to pull on pants. When he came out, Shyne was sitting straight-legged on the floor, sucking on a big, pink-handled face plug and hugging her bubba full of green Mountain Dew, staring at whatever was on HBO. Krista stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the cop uniform hanging on the door.

  “Dez told me you were staying here.”

  “What do you want, Kris?”

  “To see you before you go.”

  Doug raised his bare arms and let them fall again. “Seen.”

  “To give you one last chance.”

  “Kris,” he said. He saw it all unfolding: Claire arriving late at his room, bags packed, only to find Krista and Shyne there.

  She sat down on the end of the bed. “Do you know my prick brother wouldn’t even let me use his car?”

  “You can’t stay. We’re grouping up here in a couple of hours.”

  “Like I’m his slave. Him and his bullshit, I’ve had it.”

  “We’re not using the cars, you know that. How’d you get here?”

  She shrugged. “I had no other choice.”

  Doug moved to the window, seeing his Caprice parked at a slant in the lot below. Now the G would have his car at Fenway the night before the job. “You stole my car.”

  “The registration says I borrowed my car.”

  He looked back at her. “Where is this coming from?”

  “I’m ready to go away too. I’ve decided. I need the change, like you. Away from the Town, I think I can be a different person. Away from him.” She glanced at the mayhem on TV, people running out of a burning building. “You know he’s pissed at you leaving. Thinks you’re hiding from him here. I said you’re hiding from me.” She looked back at Doug. “Which one of us are you hiding from?”

  “I’m not hiding.”

  “He smoked tonight. He’s dusted. Thought you’d want to know that.”


  Doug rocked on his feet, squeezing his fists.

  “You know what’s going to happen to him after you leave. Without you here, he’s going to fuck up, and they’re gonna come after his half of the house, and then where am I?”

  “They can’t take the house.”

  “Like hell they can’t. Where’s my security? Why am I still asking guys for rides, and washing Jem’s frigging underwear?”

  “That’s between you and—”

  “It’s not because of him that I’ve waited. That I’ve been so fucking patient all these years. I took Jem’s shit only because I always believed my time was coming. My time with you. My whole life I’ve lived in terms of you, Duggy. What—have I not been loyal?”

  “What does loyalty got to do with—”

  “It has to do with fairness. It has to do with me being treated the way I deserve. I have been here since the beginning—before Dez, and waaay before Joanie. I’ve been loyal and I’ve been patient. But I will not be left behind. I deserve not to be left behind.”

  “Kris—” he said, but had nothing to follow it up with, having no idea where all this was coming from. “Fuck is going on here? You want to go? Then go, same as me. There is no chain on any of us, holding us to the Town. Just the same, there’s no chain holding us to each other, either.”

  “You’re wrong there.” Her smile was out of place.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “You gotta give this up. Every day of your life, living in that same house, walking those same streets, looking up and always seeing the same patch of sky—this is the result. Hanging on too tight, thinking that things can stay the same forever.”

  “Just because we’ve been having some trouble, and you’ve been going through this thing—”

  “It’s not a thing,” Doug said, needing to end this. “I am leaving. Leaving with someone else.”

  He felt like shit saying it because he wanted so hard to believe it himself. Not because it hurt Krista. Krista had come there to be hurt. To make him hurt her, then use his pity to make him stay. That was why she came toting Shyne.

  “Kris,” said Doug, glancing again at the mute phone. “We grew up together, you and me. Like brother and sister—”

  “Don’t fucking sugar me off.”

  “—and it should have stayed that way. I wish it had. We were too close. It wasn’t right.”

  She stood and came to him. She reached out to his bare stomach, and his gut rippled, but he was backed up against the window. Her hands crept around his sides and she leaned into him, holding him. There was no way out of this clinch without getting rough. He let her hold him but did not return the embrace. He felt nothing for her. He watched Shyne flashing blue-green in the light of the TV, her body casting a small, flickering shadow. Then he looked at the door that Claire was going to knock on, knowing that Krista would ruin him if she had the chance.

  She released him, her earlier smugness returned to her face. “You can’t wait for me to leave, can you?”

  “You picked up on that.”

  “Why isn’t she here now? If she’s going with you.” Krista looked at the room. “And such a trashy little fuck pad. After a Tiffany necklace, I’d’ve thought a room at the Ritz or something.”

  “What did you say?” Doug went to her, fast. “Who told you about that?”

  She was smiling now, having drawn him to her. “A little bird.”

  Doug grabbed her arms. “Who told you?”

  She smiled more fiercely in his grip. He shook her but he couldn’t shake away the smile. “You always did like it rough.”

  “What do you know about a necklace?”

  “I know I don’t see one around my neck. I know you’d rather see a rope there than jewels.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, pushing her away to keep from smacking her.

  “You better be more careful. Pushing around a pregnant woman like that.”

  Doug froze. She looked down at her flat belly, regarding it as though it were some new part of her body, laying a proud hand over it the way pregnant women do.

  “It’s Dez’s,” she said.

  Doug’s hands came up to his forehead. He mashed his eyes with the heels.

  “Ah,” she said. “So broken up for a friend. Most people offer congratulations.”

  Doug raised his face to the ceiling, eyes still covered, elbows pointing at the corners of the room. He pressed until he saw stars. Dez.

  “You think the Monsignor will do the right thing?”

  “Make an honest woman of you?” Doug said. Then he dropped his hands, his vision clearing around her defiant face. “You Coughlins.”

  Her eyes were fierce, teasing. “I don’t think his mother likes me.”

  “What do you want? What is this? If I agree to stay, you’ll set Dez free?”

  She stepped before him, her hands resting against his pecs, fingertips light as flies. “Take me with you. I’ll get an abortion—I’ll go to hell for you, Duggy.” Her palm settled over his heart. “But do not leave me behind.”

  Doug stared at her with the disgust he normally reserved for his morning mirror. “Probably we deserve each other,” he said, pulling her hands off his chest and throwing them back at her. “But I’m not doing this anymore. No more fixing things, me smoothing it over for everybody. Babysitting Jem. I told Dez to stay away, I warned him.”

  He moved past Krista, scooping up Shyne and her bubba, the girl’s eyes still glued to the set as he carried her away.

  “The fucking problem here,” he went on, “is me. I’m the enabler. I’m the guy helping everything hold together, when it’s all screaming to break apart.” He marched to the door with Shyne under his arm, opened it, turned. “Everybody will be better off once I’m gone.”

  Krista followed him only as far as the corner of the bed. “Duggy. Do not do this.”

  “Or what? You’ll have the kid? Just like you had this one?” Sad Shyne sagged under his arm, hanging from his side. “Who’s her father, Krista? Huh? Since we’re letting in a little truth here. Who was it? Was it Jem?”

  She recoiled in disgust. “Jem?”

  “Who, then?”

  Her “Fuck you, Duggy” seemed heartfelt, but he couldn’t trust anything she said now. And anyway the point was moot.

  “You know what?” he said. “If I was going to take anyone with me, it would be her.” Doug set Shyne gently down on the floor of the empty hall, then stepped back into the room.

  Krista was not budging. “We’re coming with you.”

  “You’re getting out of here. Now.”

  “Duggy. Don’t you say no to me. You think about this, Douglas MacRay. I want you to think about what you’re doing—”

  He grabbed her arm. She fought him—“No!”—pounding his chest, pushing up at his chin, digging her nails into his windpipe, while inexorably he maneuvered her toward the door. With a final kicking yell, she shook herself free, then walking the few remaining steps into the hallway, as though she had some last shred of pride to preserve.

  Outside, she turned, alternately cool and smiling furiously. “You don’t know what you just—”

  Doug closed the door, threw the lock. He expected banging, screaming, and knew that she could outlast him, this woman without shame, and that he would be forced to readmit her before guests complained and police were called.

  But there was nothing. When he looked through the spyglass later, fully expecting to see her still standing there with Shyne, she was gone.

  50

  THE DIME

  FRAWLEY’S TELEPHONE RANG AS he was sprinkling shredded cheese over his scrambled eggs. Ocean-driven rain whipped his window overlooking the toll bridge. His microwave clock read 7:45.

  A Sergeant Somebody, calling from the emergency room at Mass General. “Yeah, Agent Frawley? Hey, we got a DWI here, banged up in a one-car in the Charlestown Navy Yard? Kissed a big anchor on display in front of one of the dry docks.”

 
; Frawley’s first thought was Claire Keesey. “I need a name.”

  “Coughlin, Kristina. Got that off the auto reg. A white Caprice Classic. Had a kid with her. Little girl’s fine, but the mother is banged up and belligerent. Claims she’s working with you, which seems specious, but she did have your card, this phone number written on the back. DSS came already and took away the little girl. Ms. Coughlin is under arrest, but she says we need to get you involved first.”

  Frawley dumped his hot eggs into the garbage. “I’m leaving now.”

  The walk to his car, the rain, the rush hour cost him thirty minutes. He walked the halls of Mass General in wet shoes, his creds getting him thumbed inside the ER to a wide room like a voting hall under morgue light, rimmed with curtained bays.

  “Hi,” he said, stopping at the nurses’ station, “I’m looking for…”

  Then he heard her voice cutting across the room—“How ’bout you put on that assless smock first, Denzel, then I will”—and started in that direction. A good-looking, flustered black doctor shrugged aside a pale yellow curtain.

  “Coughlin?” said Frawley, heading past him.

  But the harried doctor slowed him up. “Listen. She needs to be seen by our plastic surgeon. If you have any influence over her, please stress that. Laceration’s too deep for simple stitching, s he’ll be scarred for life.”

  “Yeah—okay.” Frawley tried to get past, but the doctor had a hand on his arm now.

  “She claims she was pregnant,” he said. “But the blood test was negative, and no signs of miscarriage.”

  Frawley took his arm back. “Hey, I’m not family or anything, I don’t need to know.” He walked to her bay, pushed the curtain aside.

  Krista was sitting in the padded visitor’s chair, a gauze wrap around her forehead with a bright red bloom over her left eye, blood spatter on her sweatshirt and her jeans. “Here’s handsome,” she said.