Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  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 wallpaper 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."

  Jem nodded. "Only asking 'cause I need to know whether I should put you in on the third floor here or not. Shyne, you know-- I don't want her wondering who that guy's supposed to be up there, if there's no Uncle Duggy living upstairs anymore."

  Jem had even included the roof wires he used to steal his cable. "I'm done," Doug told him. "And if this job falls the way it should, it's your time to step away too. A walk-off home run."

  Jem considered this, eyeing his house. "Yeah, maybe you're right."

  "Things do change, man. Nothing wrong with that."

  "No, sure."

  "We had a fucking amazing run. By any standard."

  "Yo, we set the standard."

  "The Florist, if you keep going back to him-- kid, the guy's a pimp like that. He'll keep turning you out till you get bounced for good."

  Jem scowled, and Doug saw that Jem was just shining him on.

  "Other thing I have to say to you is, the weight of this take, all the variables involved-- you should pack a parachute. We all should. In case things don't go smooth."

  "Nah," Jem said. "It's gonna go great."

  "It is. But in case."

  Jem shook his head. "I don't see me running. If I have to stay away a little while, let things cool down, whatever-- yeah, fine. But I don't see it."

  Doug turned to the windows, chilled by Jem's faith in an unchanging future. He'd build the entire Town in miniature if he could, and sit in this same room, playing the pieces forever.

  "Still out there?" said Jem.

  Doug looked down to the gray van with twin antennas and tinted windows parked a few houses down the slope. "Still there."

  "Dumb fucks," snorted Jem, reaching for his beer and taking a hard swig. "It's gonna go awesome, man. Fucking awesome."

  * * *

  THE AREA SURROUNDING A Major League ballpark is a minefield for a recovering alcoholic. Doug's own hotel had a baseball-themed lounge out front, and he sat there now, alone at a small table by the darkened windows, two hours before game time, watching fellow ticket-holders tanking up. On the wall near him hung an unlit Bud Man sign, the red-masked "super-beer-o" of the 1970s. When the waitress came by, Doug said, "Bud draft," and it was like flexing his muscles at the beach. Let's see how strong I am.

  Frank G. always said, Never walk into a tavern or a liquor store, especially alone. But sometimes fate had to be tempted. Sometimes you had to walk right back up to the edge of that cliff, just to remind yourself what it had felt like lying at the bottom.

  The beer arrived in a short glass, set upon a cocktail napkin like a supplicant on a prayer mat. Doug looked down at the thin brew, held a little powwow with it, then rejected it as unworthy. A vow was only as strong as its greatest temptation, and this was not enough. He threw three crumpled dollar bills at the table and emerged sinless into the all-knowing, all-seeing light of day.

  He crossed the street again to the gardens. He walked to her gate and saw that she had still not been back. A few fallen leaves lay around her beds now, like dead thoughts in an idle mind. Something small-mouthed and busy had been chewing on her herbs.

  After leaving Jem that morning, he had humped his laundry sack over the hill to the Boys and Girls Cl
ub, just to give fate a chance. But he didn't see her there and didn't go inside. Instead, he hailed a cab and directed it up Packard Street and the alley behind there one last time. The purple Saturn with theBreathe! bumper sticker was back in its parking space. When the cab drove out of City Square, Doug looked back one last time, determined never to return to the Town again.

  * * *

  FRIDAY NIGHT, THEY STROLLED the caves of iron and stone beneath the stands, Doug and Dez, now in the company of packs of hungry, bladder-heavy fans.

  The bored detail cop stood inside the short hallway between the open Employees Only door and the heavier door to the money room. Doug and Dez cruised it five or six times in the anonymity of the grazing crowd, getting familiar with the layout but learning nothing new.

  The ambulance sat inside the closed bay door at the first aid station, a pair of EMTs sitting on the metal backstep, chatting up two girls. Doug's eye followed the tracks the door rose on, finding the manual on/off switch for the outside red lamp.

  Concession lines ran ten and twelve deep, stretching back to the relish bowls and squirt tubs, condiment droppings spotting the stone floor like bat shit. Money was changing hands everywhere and Doug should have been thrilled. Red-visored girls tissuing out pretzels and milking soft-serve vanilla into collectible batting-helmet cups, kids jumping up and down with their pennants and posters and machine-signed team pictures, hassled dads pulling green from their wallets. Yellow-shirted snack hawkers humping empty drink racks and metal hot-dog boxes to a busy side room near Gate D, emerging moments later with a full whack and marching back out to the stands. And it was hot that night, nineties and humidity predicted all weekend, what Red Sox Nation called a scawcha, perfect for moving ice cream bars and Cokes.

  But all this chewing and spending he viewed through a filter of disgust. The swine and their swill. He sidestepped a lump of cheesy nachos on the floor that looked like someone had shat them there and kept on moving, then ducked into the men's room to take a leak at the trough. The ballpark seemed to him a factory of shit and piss and cash. At root, the business of baseball was no better or different from the movies or from church: put on a show, promise people something transcendent, and then bleed the suckers dry.

  They took their seats again in the sixth, just back of the right-field pole. A foul ball arced high over their heads, slowing at the top of its ascent like a fire-work shell about to explode, bloom, and twinkle away, then drifted back over the roof boxes out onto Van Ness. The fans groaned and sat back down, except for Doug and Dez, who had never stood.

  Doug was hunched over a bag of peanuts, shelling one after another. Some asshole had kicked over a beer two rows back, the stain spreading like urine under Doug's seat. He dropped the cracked shells down there to soak up the spill, the same way the peanuts absorbed the saliva flooding Doug's mouth. He would never give in for a Fenway beer.

  Thinking about drinking now was like fantasizing about the perfect crime. How he would do it-- if he were going to do it.

  A halfhearted wave came by, fans rising and falling in a ripple around them, Dez and Doug again keeping their seats. Dez said, "And I used to think the beach-ball thing was annoying."

  Doug muttered, "Fucking retards."

  Dez checked him. "What's up? You been pissed all night."

  Doug frowned, shook it off. "Thought I could lose myself in the prep, but it's not happening. I'm like borderline okay when I'm focused on the job."

  "Otherwise?"

  Doug cracked another peanut shell. "This thing can't happen fast enough for me."

  "You always said, Duggy-- no marquee scores."

  Doug nodded. "That is what I always said."

  "And never be greedy."

  "Right."

  Dez looked him over. "Is it the girl?"

  Doug shook his head. "Girl's gone, man."

  "That's what I'm talking about."

  "It's the Florist, it's the G-- it's fucking everything."

  Dez watched him working the peanuts. "They don't bake fortunes in those things, you know."

  Doug spread his hands and saw the heap of cracked shells between his work boots, kicking it over like the mound of trash that was his life. The smell of piss-water beer assailed him from all sides, but especially from the guy in the brand-new Red Sox ballcap sitting next to him.

  "Dezi, man, listen. I've been thinking it over, and this one's not for you. There's no tech on this job, nothing cute. It's us walking in the front door with guns in our hands. Something goes wrong, it could get messy. I'm serious."

  Dez looked at him. "You think I can't-- "

  "The other two, I couldn't talk them off it if I tried. Wouldn't waste my breath. I told Jem this morning to pack a bag just in case, he didn't even hear me. But you. You know better. And I'm the one who got you into this thing. Dez-- you know I used you, right? I mean, in the beginning."

  "I-- sure."

  "'Cause I'm a piece of shit that way. 'Cause it was all about the job then, and nothing else. But now you're my responsibility, and I can't have that on me, okay? Because things are ending. You don't wanna be in business with the Florist anyway. Think of your dad."

  Dez looked out at the field. "I been thinking about him. Probably too much."

  "Fuck the Florist. Guy's a relic. Once he goes down, the whole Town goes. All the old ways."

  Dez said, staring out at the field, "Someone's got to get him."

  "Forget about that. Hey." Doug punched him in the shoulder. "I don't even want to hear that from you."

  Dez shook his head. "I'm not backing out now, Duggy. Even if I wanted to, see? Which I don't. And besides-- you couldn't pull this off with just three guys."

  "Easily."

  "You lie. You're full of bullshit, and I don't like this, Duggy. You look desperate. And everything you taught me, everything you're about, says that's the wrong way to go into this."

  "Then gimme your out. Steer clear."

  "Fine, I'll walk. When you do."

  "Cut that shit out now." Doug cracked his last peanut shell, then crumpled the bag and threw it to the floor. "See, I am desperate. My life right now-- fuck it. Two or three weeks ago, I could have walked away, come out way ahead. Now, I need this. Makes me sick, this whole thing-- Fergie, the G-- fuck them all. But I'm not leaving here without nothing. I thought one big final stake would free everybody, but Jem's not gonna stop. Gloansy, neither. It was just my fantasy. But you-- you got your thing going, you got your job, your ma to take care of."

  "Is there something about this job you're not telling me?"

  "What I'm telling you is that you should walk. You're clear right now. Me? I'm a point down, I got no choice but to pull my goalie from the net, go for a last-minute score. I gotta finance my walkaway. This is the only way I know how."

  The crowd surged around them again, jumping up-- then diving out of the way of a screaming foul ball.

  "The fuck-- !"

  A splash of wet into Doug's lap. Coldness soaking his chest through his shirt, running down his arms.

  The guy next to him righted himself, standing, his beer cup dripping empty in his hand.

  "Oh, Christ!" he said, the MLB hologram-logo tag dangling off his ballcap. "Shit, I'm sorry about that. Let me get some napkins, let me buy you something-- "

  Doug got to his feet and slammed the guy in the face. The guy went over backward into the row behind them, his brand-new hat popping off his head.

  Doug continued to whale on him until someone hooked up Doug's arms-- Dez-- practically climbing onto Doug's back to stop him. Everyone shouting, no one making sense, Doug ready to turn and start fighting Dez.

  Only the sight of the kid made him stop. Eight years old, sitting in the next seat over, frozen in fear. Also wearing a new ballcap. The guy's son.

  Doug shook off Dez and slid past the cowering kid into the aisle, ducking quickly down the ramp into the caves just as blue security shirts arrived on the scene. He walked out the first open gate he could find and st
arted running when he hit the street-- trying to escape the odor of piss-beer rising off him, the stink watering his eyes.

  47

  Getaway

  AFTER THE GAME, THERE was a party two doors down from his, and Doug lay across his bed, hearing the music, the laughter in the hallway, the late-night splashing in the hotel pool. He busied his mind by cooking up a grand scheme to implicate the Florist in the heist, while at the same time cutting him out of the split-- with the double cross forcing the four of them into permanent exile from the Town, thereby saving them all. It was a plan both vengeful and heroic, but he grew tired working out the particulars, falling asleep happy. When he woke up Saturday morning, the scheme's logic fell apart like wet tissue in his hands.