Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  "And his hand, there's like this little squeeze of pressure, and I get in tight. I'm right there, him breathing on me, this half-ghost, looking me square in the eye. 'Frank,' he whispers. 'Frank.'

  "I say, 'What is it, Billy, anything at all.'

  " 'A drink, Frank. Get me a drink.'

  "The EMT next to me, he jumps up again, calling for bottled water, a dying man's last request. Me, I'm kneeling there as cold as a fish on ice. Because I know Billy T. I know this weepy old, bandy-legged Irish punter with bologna on his breath. He didn't want any water to drink just then. He didn't want fucking water."

  Doug shared Frank G.'s chill, but not his anger. Frank left it hanging there, until Doug finally had to ask, "So what happened?"

  Frank G. looked at him like Doug hadn't heard a word he'd said. "That's what happened. That's the story."

  "No, what happened to Billy T.?"

  Frank shrugged, pissed. "My guys did the best they could for him. We shimmed some timber cribbing around the wheels to cut down on the vibration, we raised the truck. What happened to Billy T.? They put a sheet over his face and took him away. We hosed off the road and went back to the station."

  A gust of laughter from the clerk and an Indian customer at the counter-- Doug and Frank G. sitting there like two guys who had just donated blood.

  "Okay," Doug said.

  Frank G. looked up from the study he was making of his coffee cup. "Okay, what?"

  "Okay, so I'm waiting for you to drop some wisdom on me."

  "Wisdom? I got nothing for you, buddy. I'm fresh out here. Billy T., he was a royal pain in the ass at meeting-- but the guy did good work. He was dry some twelve fucking years. I can't get my mind around this thing."

  "What, that he-- "

  "That with all the work he did, twelve long years-- every single day of it he was just marking time until he could take a drink again. Waiting for that day. Like someday he'd hit all nines on the odometer and it would roll over to zero again and he'd get to start fresh. A life with no restrictions on it. And what I want to know is-- is that all of us? Just marking time here, waiting? Thinking someday, some miracle's gonna happen, and we're going to be free again?"

  Doug nodded. "Maybe, yeah."

  "Christ, don't agree with me, Doug. I'm fighting for my life here. What was he thinking, what? That heaven is an open bar? Jesus wiping out pint glasses, setting out a coaster, What'll you have? That's what we're being good for here?"

  "The guy was dying, Frank."

  "Fuck him." Frank sat back. "Fuck Billy T."

  "All right, Frank. Hey."

  "Fuck you, hey. You weren't there. How would you like it if I was going down, you holding my hand, and I asked you for a quick pop? Huh? I begged you?"

  "I wouldn't like it at all."

  "You'd be sick. Fucking repulsed. All my words here? You'd tell me I was full of shit, and you'd be right." He dropped his hands on the table. "I am, anyway."

  "Frank, man," said Doug, looking around for something to say to him. "I don't wanna see you like this."

  "Listen, Doug, you're still my obligation, you got my number. But I can't do this anymore. Least not right now."

  "Whoa, hold up. What are you-- "

  "I'm saying maybe you ought to be in the market for another sponsor."

  "Frank-- no fucking way, Frank. No way. You can't."

  "Can. Am."

  Doug stared. "Frank-- you would never let me."

  "No? How would I stop you? Huh? How you gonna stop me?"

  Doug rubbed his face hard in a panic. Up popped a memory from a long-ago meeting, one Jem had appeared at-- uninvited, twenty minutes late, and stinking drunk. He had dropped into a folding chair two rows behind Doug and, in the middle of Billy T.'s lament, started humming "The Star-Spangled Banner." When someone finally asked him to leave, Jem burst out crying and started talking about his father and how he never really knew the guy, and all he ever wanted was his love. Two people slid down the row to comfort him, at which point Jem jumped up and cackled, Suckaz!-- knocking over chairs and lurching toward the door. Duggy, he had said, c'mon, man, lezz go! And it was Frank who came over to Doug later, telling him, Your friends are afraid of you getting healthy. They want to keep you sick.

  "Frank," said Doug, still searching for some angle to play, some lever to pull-- but all he could summon was unreasonable anger. "Don't walk out on me now. I need this."

  "Hey. Sorry if my little crisis of faith is inconvenient for you. Sorry if I'm the one maybe needs a little counseling now."

  "I-- I can't fucking counsel you. I wouldn't know the first-- "

  "Then respect my decision and leave it at that, for Christ's sake." Frank picked up his keys and started to stand, then sat back down again. Something else was tugging at him. "I wasn't going to tell you this. But this guy came to see me about you."

  Doug froze. "What guy?"

  "Other day, over at the station house. Showed me an FBI badge, asked if I knew someone named Doug MacRay. We went back and forth on that one a little while, me trying to go the priest-doctor-lawyer route, confidentiality. He wouldn't have it. Kind of a prick. So I basically told him what I knew. That this Doug M. reminded me of myself some fifteen years ago, and that I was trying to be a sort of priest to him, the way I wish someone'd been a priest to me. I asked this guy, I said to him, 'You got a priest?' And he says, 'Yeah. Me.' So I tell him, 'No, then you're lost. Gotta answer to someone.' He says, 'I do answer to someone. The archdiocese of the FBI.' "

  Frawley. What had he told Frank G.? Frank, who had always praised him. Frank, who thought Doug was something.

  "You probably... maybe you heard some things," Doug said. "About me-- did you hear some things?"

  Frank ignored that like he hadn't heard Doug. "So then this guy, he says to me, 'Priests don't hit their wives.' "

  Doug got lost on that one.

  "Yeah," said Frank, nodding his way through this. "I hope you're hearing this first from me. I am a shitbag wife-beater. That was my drunk, getting pissed off and slapping around my first wife. Great guy, huh? Good sponsor. Finally she had me arrested one night, but jail time would have meant no firefighting job, no salary, and as she was now fixing to divorce me, no alimony. So she dropped the charges. I have her greed to thank for my life now." Frank smiled bitterly, blowing out a long breath. "So much pride I had. That I'd turned everything around since then. That I'd put down this asshole living inside me." He shook his head. "Fucking Billy T.," he mumbled, pulling himself to his feet. "You got my pager if you need it."

  Doug stood with him, in shock. "Frank..."

  Frank shook his head, unable to look Doug in the face. "Careful crossing that street," he said, and then he was out the door.

  34

  Definitely Good Night

  DOUG TURNED IN HIS seat again, scanning the faces behind him, fans carrying beer caddies up the aisles behind home plate, leaning on the back rail with their scorecards and their ballpark food. The wires in their ears were just radio earphones, and Doug told himself to relax.

  "What are you looking for?" asked Claire, next to him.

  "Nothing," he said, turning back. He had bought her an official Red Sox dugout jacket after the weather turned chilly in the fifth inning. The cuffs were empty, her hands tucked inside the leather sleeves. Her necklace hung below her throat. "Just taking in the crowd. The Fenway experience. Getting my money's worth."

  He looked out past the plate umpire's broad back to Roger Clemens on the mound, the ace, ten years off his rookie season. Clemens hid his grip behind his glove and stared in, shaking off a sign. He went into his motion, delivered, and the pitch sliced flat off the bat, fouled straight back against the screen-- the first ten rows jumping like heads on springs.

  "Are we hiding?" she said.

  Doug turned to her. "What?"

  She shrugged under the bulky jacket, curious. "I don't know."

  She had picked up on his sleuth paranoia. A yellow-shirted hawker appeared in the ais
le and Doug waved him up, as though a box of Cracker Jack was what he had been looking for all along. "Here we go."

  "I guess I thought the secretive stuff would go away after a while," she said, softening her words with a smile. "You being so hard to get hold of. I mean-- it's romantic and all, you leaving me a Red Sox ticket on my garden seat. Just not normal."

  "It bothers you, yeah? I can give you my phone number, no problem. Just that I'm never home, and I don't have an answering machine."

  She shook her head, denying making any demands on him. The kid with the $2.25 price button on his cap came with a rack of oversized Cracker Jack boxes, and Doug busied himself paying for one. The kid was slow making change, his leafy roll of cash drawing Doug's roving criminal eye. Maybe someday that would go away, he thought. Maybe he could train himself not to watch for these things, not to compulsively puzzle out ways to relieve cash businesses of their profits.

  For the first time in a long time, certainly since he got sober, Doug had nothing lined up. Nothing else he was working on, no jobs, nothing in prep. Frank G.'s defection weighed on him as one more reason to move on. All he had to do now was devise some sort of graceful exit strategy from the Town, some way to tell the others good-bye.

  Claire eyed him as he rose half out of his seat to stuff his cash roll back into his jeans. He remembered how she had fallen silent when he'd pulled it out to pay for her jacket.

  He ripped open the box of caramel popcorn and offered her some, which she declined. "Do you ever see your father much?" she asked.

  Doug looked out to the left-field wall, which was where this question seemed to come from. "I see him once in a while. Why?"

  "What sort of things do you two talk about?"

  "I don't know. Not much." He dug down to the bottom of the box for the prize. "Hey, flag tattoo," he said, making to hand it to her, but with her hands pulled into her cuffs, he tucked it into her jacket pocket.

  "I guess I'm just imagining my father in prison...."

  Why was she pawing him with questions? "I'm not my father," he told her. "Maybe that's what you're asking. It took a while, because as a kid I idolized him-- it was just him and me, after all. Took a while for me to get a good look at him and start working hard at being everything he's not."

  She nodded, liking what she heard. Still, something in her eyes wanted more.

  Doug looked down. This seemed as good a time as any. He prefaced his story with "Seems like I'm always doing this with you."

  "Doing what?"

  He took a breath before launching into it. "I was at this bar once. Five years ago now. Bully's, a Townie tavern. Doing my thing, bunch of us, drinking pitchers, carousing. I don't remember much of this firsthand. I know a guy came in, older than us, getting his drink on. He's looking at me, and I'm getting annoyed. Some point he comes over, asks am I Mac MacRay's son. Tells me he knew my dad years ago, worked with him close, and I'm like, whatever. Until he tells me how he recognized me. Smiles and says I look exactly the way my dad looked when he got drunk."

  The wave came around, everyone jumping to their feet and throwing their hands in the air except Doug and Claire.

  "And I guess I attacked the guy. I have almost no memory of this. But if they hadn't pulled me off him, it would have been bad. Hospital he went to got the law involved, and the guy fingered me. And I'm grateful now. I am."

  She watched him closely. Almost like she knew this already or suspected something like it.

  "I did some prison time for that. Hated it, and I will never go back. Only thing to come of it was, I started on the program while I was in there. Changed my life. Cleared probation a year ago, now I'm free and clear. And I feel free and clear." All of this was the truth. He'd only left out his earlier stint inside.

  "Wow," she said.

  "Yeah, I know. It's like a knife in my eye, every time I have to tell you these things." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Alcoholic. Broken family. Ex-con. Not much to take home to your parents, huh?"

  She absorbed all this, turning back to the field. "I told my parents I quit," she said. "They want me to go see a psychiatrist. Which I actually had been considering on my own-- but now, forget it."

  "You don't need one."

  "No?" she said, shooting him a quick, angry look she seemed to regret.

  Doug felt the chill. "You're full of questions tonight."

  "Am I?"

  "Something on your mind?"

  She shook her head, hesitant, as though easing her way into this. "Agent Frawley came to see me again and I guess it shook me up a little."

  Doug stared at the mound to control his reaction. "Yeah? How so?"

  She was looking at him now. Fucking looking at him, and Doug made a study of the Milwaukee pitcher checking the runner on first. He would not look back at her.

  "He said they were sure now that the bank robbers are from Charlestown."

  Doug nodded. "Yeah?"

  "He said they're watching some people. Getting close."

  Did she know? Would she be telling him this if she knew anything? Was she testing him? Feeling him out? Trying to help him?

  "I guess I'm worried," she said.

  Maybe she did know. Maybe she knew and she accepted it and she was only waiting for him to come clean to her. Clear the air. Put all this behind them.

  A fantasy. He turned slowly, giving her plenty of time to break off her scrutiny of him. "What are you worried about?"

  She shrugged inside the dugout jacket. "Testifying, I guess. Living in the same town as these people. Things like that."

  She looked back at him on Things like that, searching him-- was she?-- and Doug held his expression, nearly impossible, looking into her eyes, wondering suddenly who was lying to whom.

  Had Frawley put her up to questioning him? This was Jem's voice inside his head, he knew that, and it twisted his stomach.

  Would she wear a wire for Frawley?

  "He told me there were some developments in the case," she said.

  Don't ask.

  Doug nodded, checking the game, keeping his eye on the ball. Developments?

  Don't. Let it go.

  "Must be a long process," he said, "an investigation like that." He had hardly felt the words leaving his throat. "Probably still a long ways off."

  Why was she nodding? Was she waiting for more from him? Baiting him here?

  Don't.

  Going crazy. "Maybe if you just don't think about it," he said. Were they communicating in code now? Don't think about me that way-- think about me the way I am now. "Put it out of your mind. Don't deal with it unless you have to."

  Her eyes were on him again, and he tried to guess her emotion. Relief? Surprise? Was she hearing this other thing in his words?

  Do not ask.

  Developments.

  He had to know. Maybe she wanted to tell him-- maybe she was trying to warn him here.

  Or maybe she didn't know anything. His head was pounding like his heart had traded places with his brain.

  Don't.

  His words caught her just as she was looking away in relief. "Why?" He shrugged it, like he didn't have a care in the world. "What are these developments?"

  And she came back to look at him-- they were searching each other-- and he could tell by her eyes that he had made a disastrous mistake.

  She turned away first, looking down at the ballcap of the boy sleeping against his father's shoulder in the seat before her. Doug had been found out.

  "Fingerprints," she told him.

  Doug nodded, frantic to unmake his mistake, trying to swamp her doubts with forced enthusiasm. "Fingerprints, wow." Whose? "I didn't even know they still solved crimes that way."

  She shrugged.

  "Anyway," he went on, headlong, "you definitely shouldn't worry. Not about your role in it. There's really nothing to worry about, that I can see."

  The silence that came over them was charged, the game going on before their eyes and not mattering. Nothing mattered sudden
ly. The wave swept past and again failed to lift them. Then another sort of commotion-- someone slapped Doug hard on the shoulder, and he turned fast, expecting Adam Frawley and federal badges and guns.

  It was Wally the Green Monster, Fenway Park's furry green mascot, demanding a high five.

  People around them pointed to the electronic scoreboard over the center-field bleachers, the seat numbers flashing there. Claire was one of four lucky winners of a free pancake breakfast at Bickford's.