Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

Greg realized he was about to get hit. “I... a guy I work with.”

“Who?”

“Just a guy. I work at a managed-care facility.” Greg was teary. “A goddamn nursing home. He gives it to me, I bring it to Ricky. Ricky’s my friend. He’s sick.”

Maven caught his breath. He straightened, releasing Greg.

Greg was hyperventilating. “What are you? Some kind of cop?”

Maven reached down for him again, and Greg flinched as if he were going to get beat up, but Maven only pulled him to his feet. Maven fixed his coat somewhat, then stepped back. “Get out of here. Don’t ever come back.”

Greg looked at Ricky a moment, waiting for a contradictory word. Then he stuffed his money back inside his coat pockets and walked out the doors.

Maven stared at the floor, knowing he had lost it, knowing he wasn’t fully in control of himself yet.

When he looked up, the vial was gone from the sofa. Ricky stood with his head down.

Maven walked to the kitchen. He bent back the cover of the hacked-open can and gobbled down the cold soup. Lumpy, gelatinous paste, but he barely tasted it, the food landing in his stomach like a fist.

He slid the long-shaft screwdriver into his belt. He found Ricky’s car keys hanging on a peg near the door, next to Ricky’s patrol cap. Maven took both.

Maven said, “I need to borrow your car.”

He drove the Parisienne back into Boston, cruising a gas station sharing a parking lot with a McDonald’s just two blocks from a Topeka Street methadone clinic. He parked and walked over to the gated trash pen beside the gas station, away from the brightest lights. He waited with his hands in his pockets, Ricky’s cap brim low over his eye bandage, until a guy in a black-and-gold Bruins hoodie sauntered past.

“Don’t be so fucking obvious, man.”

Maven let the guy cross the parking lot before following him. A row of trash-strewn evergreens lined a fence.

The runner doubled back, hands in his front pouch pockets. “Well?”

“I want it,” said Maven.

The runner looked him over, sniffling. “You don’t look cop.”

“You neither.”

He decided. “Front me ten, see what I can do.”

“I’m trusting you?”

“That’s how it works. Where the fuck you been?”

Maven said, “Iraq.”

“Huh.” The runner hunched his shoulders against the cold. “That’s fucked-up.” He snuffled deep, swallowing snot. “So, welcome back. Now pay to play.”

Maven made as if he were going to do so, then grabbed the runner by his neck, spinning him around and putting the screwdriver to his throat, the point poised at his carotid artery.

He reached inside the runner’s pouch and took from him a flip knife and a phone. “Where’s the holder?”

“The who?”

Maven pressed the point harder against the runner’s throat, enough to feel the artery pulsing through the handle.

“You crazy?”

“Wanna find out?” said Maven.

Around the corner on Atkinson, a wire-topped chain-link fence ran to a shorter wooden fence abutting a stone wall. The holder emerged from his nook, seeing the figure jogging toward him under the weak, yellow streetlights in a Bruins sweatshirt, hood up.

Maven shocked him, grabbing him by the throat. The holder bore a little chin growth trimmed into a diamond, and Maven stuck the point of the runner’s flip knife blade just below it.

He frisked the holder, coming away with another phone and knife, pocketing them, then bracing the holder’s throat with his forearm. He used the knife blade to slice through the fabric beneath the guy’s bulging cargo pants pocket and removed a folded wad of cash.

The holder couldn’t talk because of the Baggies of crack cocaine tucked under his tongue. Maven chopped him below his diamond-bearded chin, covering his mouth until the guy had no choice but to choke them down.

Maven said, “Whose corner is this?”

“My fucking corner.”

“Who you front for?”

The holder said, “You crazy.”

Maven took out the holder’s phone and opened it, snapping a photograph of the guy. “Everyone in your contact list gets this, with a message saying you’re five-oh and you flipped—”

“Okay!” said the guy with the knife at his throat.

Maven entered the shadow of the trees fronting the small house on a quiet Forest Hills side street. He waited out a bout of dizziness, then looked inside the window, seeing the back of a sofa in a darkened room.

He opened up the holder’s phone and selected the dealer’s digits from the list. He thumbed him a text message that read, 5–0 coming — ditch phones and split.

Then he waited.

The room brightened and footsteps clumped around inside. Maven heard jingling keys, then the front door opened and sneaker soles tapped flagstones. The Jeep next to Maven chirped, the locks disengaging, the dealer rounding the corner with a backpack on his shoulder, wearing two sweatshirts under a coat.

When he opened the driver’s door, Maven ran at him from behind, shoving him across the driver’s seat into the passenger side, the dealer’s head striking the door.

Maven ran his hands up inside the guy’s sweatshirts, finding a pistol. The dealer squealed, trapped and unable to see, thinking this was it.

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do me like this.”

Maven grabbed the keys out of his hand and closed the door, saying, “Cut the meek act, sit up.”

He did. The multiple layers bulked him out, but the dealer had good size to begin with. He was surprisingly clean-cut. He looked at Maven and the pistol and said, “You’re fucking crazy.”

“You shitbags keep telling me that.” Maven stuck the key in the ignition, starting up the Jeep. Then he unzipped the backpack.

Phones, another handgun, and cash below.

Lots of cash.

Maven stuck the backpack under his legs, on the floor against his calves. “I want to see Royce.”

The dealer stared, hiding his trembling under a constant nodding. “And?”

“You telling me you don’t know the name?”

“I know the president’s name too. Doesn’t mean I met the man.”

Maven threw the Jeep in reverse and banged out over the curb, riding fast down the street. “What other names you know?”

Ricky woke up dehydrated, having sweated through his clothes. He changed into boxers and stumbled out to the fridge for some Mountain Dew and found Maven sitting at the kitchen table.

Instead of food in front of him, there were two guns, two ejected clips, a handful of phones, two knives, seven or eight thick bundles of cash, and a folded white take-out bag scribbled all over with a checklist of names and addresses.

Maven, all dark energy, looked up at Ricky. “I’m gonna be here a couple of days, maybe a week. Maybe longer.”

Lash showed up late at the shoot house in Mattapan. This one was full service. You go in through the front door and choose door A or door B. Door B was unlocked and led to a warren of rooms inside, each one worse than the next. That was the shooting gallery, where you shot, snorted, or smoked whatever you bought through the pay hole in door A. That door had been reinforced with a cage soldered into a steel frame, two hinged slots cut into the backing wood, one at eye level, the other at hand level.

Door A was open and warped now and wouldn’t close. A table inside had been knocked over, a bag of Doritos spilled on the floor, along with Baggies and cellophane and powder. All this amid a drying pool of urine.

DEA agent Novack was inside waiting for him. “Still here, huh?”

Lash nodded. “Still got me bouncing.”

“How long?”

“Any day now.”