Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

Maven was sitting up, more pillows behind his shoulders and head. The Jamaican stood behind Lockerty eating from a styrofoam take-out carton, something fishy.

Maven noticed the watch on the Jamaican’s wrist. Maven looked at his own bare wrist. It was his Oris.

“ Admire is too strong a word, but I like your fortitude,” Lockerty was saying. “It makes me smile. Your fantasies of retribution. It’s pretty fucking funny, you down here making plans.”

“It’s no fantasy.”

“No? You’re going to will it to happen?”

“What else do I have?”

“I love the spirit. You are a true American, kid. A dreamer and a fool.” Lockerty looked outside the window, the first time Maven had seen him do that. “What you don’t know is, my entire organization, everything I built, is gone, kaput. Me? I’m fine, I’m out here now. I got my head and my balls. I got fire still. You?” Lockerty shrugged. “Even say you did somehow magically escape. The game has changed out there. Royce has all the muscle now. He pulled in Crassion’s organization and added some of his own. Nobody knows where he coops because that’s how he wants it. Otherwise I’d be out there now, instead of here with you. So what makes you think you could succeed before I would?”

“You’re afraid of him,” said Maven. “I’m not.”

A flicker of a smile passed over Lockerty’s face, masking his anger. The words hit a little too close to home. “Is that what it is?”

“That’s why you keep me here like a voodoo doll against him, sticking pins and needles in me.”

Lockerty forced a smile, to prove that he was still enjoying himself. “You shoulda started talking a long time ago.”

“I was amusing myself with these thoughts today, these scenarios.” Lockerty stood by the window now, leaning against the frame. “I was thinking how funny it would be, how fitting, if I did turn you loose after all. Sent you off on your merry errand.”

Maven’s eyes betrayed nothing, no hope or desire. His future did not hinge on Lockerty’s charity because Maven could no longer be deceived into believing that such a thing existed. No one could ever break his heart again because he no longer had a heart to break.

“His own soldier going after him. Good sport, right? Good opera. In theory.”

Maven said, “You don’t want to do that.”

Lockerty knit his brow, flicking at his ear to show that he didn’t think he had heard Maven right. “Not let you go?” He was more intrigued than before. “Why is that?”

“Because after I get through with Royce, I’m coming back for you.”

Lockerty’s hard stare eventually dawned into a smile.

Maven woke up to find someone sitting at the edge of his bed. Not a man but a kid, a teenager, his back to Maven, doing something with his hands. Making a repetitive flip-flip-flip noise that Maven recognized, but not right away. Not until the kid turned and Maven saw his face.

It was Maven himself. The adolescent time bomb, obsessively practicing the flicked-wrist opening of a butterfly knife.

Maven startled awake. Pain in his arm as he thrashed about.

The white Jamaican was pulling away from him — an empty syringe in his hand.

Maven tried to get up, forgetting the straps. “What did you do to me?”

“It’s time, soldier,” said Lockerty. “You know nothing, you are nothing. Even as an object of my wrath, you failed. That’s epic emptiness, pal.”

Maven’s arm throbbed. Something working its way through his veins into his heart, then his entire body beyond.

“Time to cut my losses and move on. But first — Mr. Leroy here needs to get something from you.”

The Jamaican came at him, smiling, with something in his hand. A knife with a small, curved blade — and he set upon Maven, carving into his face.

Two black kids, nine-year-olds, crossed the frozen ground behind the park, turning right by the wall of cracked white cement between the two boulevards.

The box stopped them. This was the way they always went and it had never been there before. A refrigerator carton of sagging cardboard, lying on its side, the top flaps folded shut.

One of them kicked it lightly. The other kid pulled the flaps.

They heard something stir inside. They backed off, looking at each other. One silently dared the other to complete the task. The folds bent apart easily.

They saw a pair of legs inside. Worn blue work pants and work boots. The smell out of the box put them off. The guy had pissed himself and maybe puked sometime in the past few hours.

One kid grabbed a stick off the ground, the longest he could find. He poked the guy’s shin. He got no response and poked it again, harder.

The guy groaned and shifted. He sat up. He shielded his face from the harsh winter sun. His eye, and almost half of his face, were thickly bandaged. He fell back, dizzy.

He wasn’t wrinkled like the old-time junkies, but the kids knew high when they saw it.

“Hey.” Maven reached out from the box, dazed and trying to see. “Hey, fellas...”

He received a smack on the top of his wrist and pulled back. He looked again, each of the boys wielding a fallen branch.

Maven said, “Hey, I—”

A whack across his chest. Another against his shoulder. A crack against the crown of his head, and he rolled into a defensive ball.

The blows rained down, barely felt on the surface, only their reverberation throughout his muscles and his bones.

Maven came to fighting off the stick kids, but now it was two blue-gloved EMTs, working by the light of a cop’s flashlight in the park.

“What did you take, sir?”

Maven tried to sit up. They pushed him back down.

“How long have you been out on the streets?”

They put a penlight in his one eye, flicking it back and forth.

“Nothing,” the EMT muttered to himself. “Sir? Hello? What happened to your eye?”

Maven tried to respond, but could not put any words together.

Next thing he knew, he was wide-awake in a sickening surge of full consciousness. It looked like an emergency room, but the walls were rocking, streetlights and upper-story apartment windows rushed past the windows. He was inside an ambulance, strapped to a stretcher.

The EMT had boosted him with Narcan, the opiate antidote. All of Maven’s claustrophobia from being confined at Lockerty’s came roaring back, and he thrashed and tore at the single strap across his waist, loosening it enough to slide out onto the floor. The EMT first banged on the partition for help, then held his arms out toward Maven as though he were trapped with a bear.

Maven stood inside the rocking vehicle. He was still alive. He was free somehow. He was back in Boston.

The driver slid open her window and Maven reached through and grabbed her throat. She cut the wheel, supplies spilling from the side of the ambulance. The impact with the telephone pole sent the stretcher into the partition, then back against the doors, popping them open. Maven stumbled out and fell to the curb, hurrying away, half-blind, from the gathering people and the lights.

Maven entered the Verizon store, the first customer of the day. The red-shirted greeter welcomed him, Maven pushing past her to the demo phones, all working models.

He squinted at the phone, his vision blurred, his head splitting. He dialed information, asking for Gridley, Massachusetts, a listing for Vetti. The automated system gave him a number and connected him.

While the phone rang, Maven was aware of the salesmen talking about him, trying to figure out what to do about this bandaged bum using the free service in their store.

Danielle’s mother picked up. Maven told her that he was a friend of her daughter’s, trying to track her down.