Chuck Hogan - Devils in Exile

The cars were all burning inside, the upholstery torn up and flaming.

Lockerty panicked. He thought about running for the road in his underwear. Then he went back up the porch stairs to Carlo, looking for his gun. He grabbed it and ran down to the grass, this time heading around the house toward the back, toward the shore.

He stopped when he saw flames coming from the second-floor of his house. At that precise moment a shirtless body smashed through the window and fell, dreadlocks over bare feet, to the ground.

Lockerty saw one-eyed Maven standing in the window, framed by fire, looking down. Lockerty popped two caps in his direction, running across the grass to the wood steps leading to the moonlit beach. Wind ripped through him, running too fast, breathing too hard. The sand was harder closer to the water, so he ran with the edge of the tide lapping at him, out past the edge of his property, hoping to find some hiding place beyond.

The first gun crack he barely heard. The second kicked up a bit of sand in front of him. He turned and fired behind him while still running. The third skipped up some water, again a miss. Lockerty turned to shoot again and was struck, middle left between two ribs, and the sudden pain brought him down.

He fired twice more in anger at Maven’s distant figure, and the gun clicked dry. Lockerty dropped it and tried crawling, but it was no good. He lay down to rest a moment and found it impossible to sit up again.

The water at his feet made bearable the heat building up inside his chest. All he could do was watch Maven limp toward him across the sand, a gun low at his side.

Maven sat a few yards away from Lockerty, feeling nothing for him now. The older man was dying and there was nothing to say.

He looked out at the water coming in, cold as moonlight, dark as oil. His thigh muscle twitched, the knife wound like a little mouth crying out in blood and pain.

When he looked back at Lockerty after a while, Lockerty was dead.

Maven detected movement to his right. A seagull, picking through the night sand. Maven hadn’t expected to see this: he hadn’t expected to see the end. He’d envisioned himself somehow fading away as the job was completed. Expiring in the process. Dying in the attempt.

Maven sighted the gull, believing it to be the same one that had visited his sickbed dreams. But eventually he lowered the gun, knowing he was done.

The morning sun rose cold over the neighborhood, light coming in at a hard slant. Maven waited after ringing the bell, and the door was pulled open by a young, brown-skinned man wearing a Tufts crewneck over a collared shirt.

Maven said, “Looking for Agent Lash.”

Rosey Lash sized up the caller, cautious. “Hold on.”

Inside, Rosey stepped back into the kitchen where Lash was clearing their breakfast dishes. “Some guy here for you, Dad. Looks pretty out of it.”

Lash went to his jacket hanging over a chair and slid his sidearm out from the holster beneath it. He tucked it into the back of his pants and went to the door.

It was Maven, though it took Lash many moments to be certain. The eye patch was legit, he could see the edge of a scar showing off one corner. Maven’s face looked as if someone had got at it with a potter’s tool. He wore a loose-fitting army jacket, a large duffel bag at his feet.

“Well.” Lash backed away from the door, inviting Maven inside.

Maven carried the heavy bag with a painful limp. He set it down next to the kitchen table with a clunk and lowered himself into one of the chairs, one leg outstretched.

Lash stood for another moment, then sat down across from him, such that Maven could not see the gun tucked into the small of his back.

“Rosey, why don’t you hit your room for a bit, all right?”

Rosey looked at his father. “You sure?”

Lash said to Maven, “We’re fine here, right?”

Maven nodded.

Rosey didn’t leave yet. “You sure you’re okay?”

Lash wanted to pull his bighearted boy into a hug. He did care about the old man after all.

“We’ll be fine,” Lash said, and Rosey backed off, retreating down the hall.

Lash relaxed a bit, now that they were alone. “What’d you do — follow me here some day?”

Maven nodded.

Lash pointed to the floor with his chin. “What’s in the bag?”

“Guns.”

Maven’s hand trembled on the table. Not nerves, more like muscle fatigue. The wristwatch was the only part of him that clicked with the put-together guy Lash first met. But there was blood on the strap, a smudge of dried red on the side of Maven’s palm and on his shirt cuff visible below the coat sleeve.

Lash made as if he were adjusting his shirt for comfort, sliding the gun from the back of his pants to the underside of his thigh. “So.”

Maven took in the open boxes on the counter and the two sealed cartons near the door. He was acutely aware of the blind spot behind him.

“I gave you up for dead,” said Lash. “Bottom of a lake somewhere. Or parceled out into Dumpsters around the city. But then I started hearing things. People saying the bandits were back — only, one guy this time. Wearing an eye patch. And a patrol cap.”

Maven reached up, feeling his unwashed hair. “Lost the cap somewhere along the way.”

“And the eye?”

“Same thing.”

Maven’s intonation was flat, as though he had suffered a concussion or some other trauma. Lash noticed more blood now, flecks on the side of his neck, a spot on his earlobe.

“So you brought guns. What about the money?”

“Gone,” said Maven. “All gone.”

Lash thought he was telling the truth. “So what brings you to my crib this chilly winter morning?”

“I thought it was obvious. I’m turning myself in.”

Lash’s mobile rang in his belt clip. His eyes stayed on Maven, but he had to let go of his sidearm under his leg to free his phone. He pressed SEND. “Lash.”

He listened, watching Maven staring at the table, the guy gingerly touching the bone around his eye patch, his mind somewhere else.

“Let me hit you back in a bit,” he said, hanging up, placing the phone on the table in front of him. Lash was excited and trying not to show it. “Cops are at a house in Swampscott right now. They found Ernesto Lockerty down by the water, shot dead, his house half-burned down.”

Maven nodded, looking up.

Lash said, “A similar thing happened to this new cat, an upstart, kind of a mystery man. Name of Brad Royce.”

Maven’s eye glanced away, came back.

Lash let all this settle over him gently, like a fresh sheet upon an old mattress. “Let me see if I got this straight. You just wiped out the drug trade in all of Greater Boston. Single-handedly. You tore it all down.”

Maven shrugged. “It won’t even last a day. Bad guys looking to fill in the void as we speak.”

“But they have some fear in them now. That’s a start.”

Maven looked around. He would remember this room. In prison, on long days in his cell, he would picture the old, imperfect glass of the cabinets, smell the congealed syrup and toaster crumbs, the tired white paint of the apartment walls. He would never forget the room he surrendered his life in.

The bruises in his back had fused into a brace of pain. He had done something to his shoulder that didn’t start hurting until now. Even his teeth felt loose as he pushed at them with his notched tongue. But his blood felt clean for the first time in a long time. He was impatient, ready to go.

“So how do we do this?” he said.

Lash had never got a decent read on Maven until now. “Black Falcon Terminal. The mess that went down. You bandits were there, weren’t you?”

Maven nodded.