Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

“You know he—”

“I didn’t ask him if he wanted a bump, I asked you . Which was a big mistake, I can see that now.” She pulled back but he did not release her. “Christ! Always so concerned about him. It’s unmanly. You forget that I’m not his employee. Now will you fucking let go of my wrist, pretty please?”

He shook it again. “Who gave it to you?”

“You don’t understand, Gridley. People don’t give it to you. You have to buy it.”

“Someone at the club?”

She was glaring at him, and finally he released her wrist. She pulled back angrily and dumped the vial into her clutch and dropped her bag to the floor. “Fine.” She leaned an elbow against the window. “Just drive then.”

He was going to cut off at the next exit and take her back home, but when the sign came up, he changed his mind, staying on the highway. Because fuck her.

“The way you four tiptoe around him,” she said. “Genuflecting. So desperate for somebody to lead you, to tell you how to think and what to do. Like a cult. You’re all brainwashed, fucking stars in your eyes. And so secretive. What a joke. Do you really think I don’t know what you were doing out there on Cape Cod all week? Do you really think I don’t know?”

She couldn’t know. She was guessing. She was close enough to Royce to figure some of it out if she cared — though she had never seemed to care before.

“Then again,” she said, “maybe he’s not exactly who he appears to be either.”

Maven drove on, saying nothing, not taking the bait.

“‘Realtors.’ That’s a good one. What’s ‘real’ about any of you?”

“You want me to take you home? Will that make you stop talking?”

“Home.” She huffed a laugh. “Home to your boss, you mean. Your master.”

She was high, and it was getting ugly, and being alone with her no longer seemed like a good idea. Maven decided to come back to the city on Route 1, giving her time to settle down while returning her to Marlborough Street before Precipice closed.

She rolled down her window after a while and turned up the music, singing along quietly with some of it, her arm outside the window, coasting on the current. Wind roared through the Range Rover, the stereo music like a jukebox playing inside a tornado. At one point he looked over and she was wiping her face, either pushing hair out of her eyes, or maybe crying.

Eventually she put up the window, but remained angled toward her door, watching the night go past. Maven eyed her shoulder beneath the thin strap of her dress, and the underside of her thigh below the slanted hem of her dress — until he realized she could probably see his reflection in the window. He settled back to drive the rest of the way in silence, and a memory returned to him.

Freshman year of high school, the parents of his pot-smoking buddy, Scotty, took them out to J. C. Hillary’s in Dedham one night. This was out of character for Scotty’s not-interested, never-around parents, and Maven and Scotty were both pretty well baked at the time, two little shits gorging on dinner rolls and giggling at silverware, trying to play it cool while the adults drank manhattans. The sedate, mid-to-upscale restaurant had Maven on sensory overload, compulsively taking little birdlike sips of water to keep from freaking out — but at one point he noticed a girl returning from the ladies’ room. After a few confirming blinks, he accepted that it was indeed Danielle Vetti, the Danielle Vetti, right there in the restaurant with him. She wore a knee-length skirt and a tight, cherry-red top, and he tracked her to a nearby table where she sat down with her family.

Another girl sat at the Vettis’ table, her back to Maven, a pair of crutches stood up against her chair. Not the sprained-ankle kind with the padded underarm bars, but the forearm collar, cerebral-palsy-type walking sticks, the sight of which sobered him. Maven never saw her face — the face of Danielle Vetti’s younger sister — nor that of her mother, who sat next to the girl, occasionally reaching over to swipe a cloth napkin across the girl’s mouth.

The hottest girl in high school had a handicapped sister. This discovery made a profound impact on him. Looking at Danielle Vetti pushing food around her plate, the rest of her family eating in silence, brought her down to earth for him. She was no more attainable, but at least understandable. She was real.

His school-shooter fantasies changed soon after that. He wasn’t the shooter anymore; he was the hero kid who jumped the shooter and knocked him out, saving Danielle Vetti. The one girl in school who secretly understood him.

She captured a song on the satellite radio and played it over and over again, Duran Duran’s moody and liquid “Come Undone.” As they neared the city, the overnight mist caught the ambient light and created a tangerine aura, a glowing shell of moisture over the city, dawn still hours away.

“He likes you, you know.” She said this so quietly, still looking out the window, that he wasn’t sure she was talking to him at first. “He talks about you, more than the others.”

Maven nodded, pleased, but didn’t let on.

She sat forward and turned down the radio. “Maybe I am a kept woman. Everybody pays one way or another. Just look at you.”

“What about me?”

“Come on, Gridley. You don’t think you’re a kept man?”

Maven sat alone inside the Marlborough Street pad, thinking about what Danielle had said. He realized that the bed he was sitting on, the tumbler of water in his hand, the Back Bay address — none of it was his.

What was he exactly? Royce’s employee, or his partner? His muscle, or his friend?

Maven shook it off. The best way to kill a good thing was to question it to death. Bottom line, the day he met Brad Royce was the luckiest day of his life.

He looked up at the ceiling, hearing her footsteps cross the floor upstairs. When he let her off at the door before going around to the alley to park the car, she had said to him:

“You’re a good soldier, Gridley.”

Then she reached over and held his cheek with her hand. A gesture of affection mixed with apology. He leaned into her soft palm, so slightly she could barely have noticed. It ended with her playfully pushing his face away.

He took it from her because he liked it, because he was all tangled up in a swirl of desire and concern. Even now, staring at the ceiling, he could still feel the touch of her hand upon his cheek.

They kept the rented van parked across the street from the smoke shop, moving it at least once daily. They took turns wandering inside the cramped shop to play a quiet hour of keno, so that they came to be seen as regulars around the Brockton neighborhood.

This was the grind work. Recon. Days of tedium leading up to ten minutes of action. “Eyes on the prize,” they reminded each other when patience wore thin, cooped up in the back of the hot van. They talked about the bikes they were going to buy themselves when this job went down.

Around three-thirty, two bikers pulled up outside the smoke shop on major-league Harleys, the chapter head of the Crossbone Champs motorcycle club and another full-patch member. Their colors — two white bones surrounded by a red circle, forming crosshairs over a small skull — were obscured under black ponchos due to the rain.

Bikers are easy to follow but notoriously tough to get close to. They are especially easy to follow when you know ahead of time where they’re going.

On the floor of the rear cargo area of the van, lined with sound-baffling furniture pads, they sat in gaming chairs. Instead of game controllers in their hands, they worked with five different mobile phones.