Devils in Exile (11 page)

Going after the drugs themselves was a failure. It meant agents had to hustle harder than street dealers to make a bust, only to see the bad guys cycle through the criminal justice system as easily as the dollars they laundered. Street money was chump change, because once the product was out on the streets, the source money, the real money, had already been made.

Disrupt the Flow. That was Lash’s mantra. Get in Their Shit. The money Windfall had seized wasn’t enough to shake the foundations of the cartels—not yet—and admittedly, drugs weren’t physically being taken off the street. But Windfall’s diligence was beginning to exact a real toll on the suppliers, Lash was sure. They could always manufacture more product, but confiscated profits were gone forever. He was hacking away at their bottom line. Getting Windfall
implemented nationwide, which was his goal, might even change the face of the American drug problem—not defeat it, never defeat it, but weaken it, break it down, make it more manageable.

L
ASH PULLED INTO A SPACE ON THE THIRD LEVEL OF THE PARKING
garage. He exchanged his overcoat and coffee-and-cream scarf for a San Antonio Spurs hoodie. He used to wear a Celtics hoodie, but too many whites came up asking if he was Robert Parish.

He crossed into the adjacent Museum of Science, paid the entrance fee, and headed over to the blue wing, second level, past the “Seeing Is Deceiving” exhibit. He slowed a moment there, recognizing two M. C. Escher works: the hand drawing the hand, and the stairs that went around in a perpetual up-or-down circle. Prints of these works adorned the office of his boss, the special agent in charge of the New England DEA, was really all one needed to know about the current state of conventional drug enforcement.

At the far end of the wing was the entrance to a separate exhibit named “Butterfly Garden.” A bunch of little kids were attacking a coatrack there like locusts denuding a tree. Padded parkas of pastel vinyl, blues and reds and pinks, getting their last few wears of the season. Lash barely remembered his children from those days because he had barely been around. Rosey, his boy—Roseland Douglass Lash, named by his mother in a pregnancy-induced hormonal rush of heritage pride—was a junior at Tufts now. Lash had set up Windfall in Boston in order to be with Rosey, an engineering major and lacrosse midfielder, before the boy was out of his grasp for good. To that end, he had offered Rosey a deal with the devil: Lash had agreed to take on his full tuition if the boy agreed to share a house with his old man. They lived together on the bottom floor of an old triple on Rogers Avenue in Somerville, two bachelors at opposite ends of the spectrum. The tuition was breaking him, but this was Lash’s last chance to connect with Rosey, and he was not going to mess it up.

The “Butterfly Garden” was a narrow, glass-walled conservatory full of exotic plants, overlooking the greater basin of the Charles River: the wide, lakelike head of the Charles that fed off Boston Harbor, before it narrowed to the icy glut that had coughed up Vasco. A twenty-person occupancy limit meant they had to stagger entrances like in the VIP section in a club. A good, small room for monitoring ins and outs. No one could tail you inside without getting made.

Inside the door, a perfect monarch settled on Lash’s shoulder, fluttering its stained-glass wings. Butterflies were everywhere, drinking nectar out of feeders, courting among the exotic foliage, basking in the early-spring sun.

There was a bench for sitting, and on it, hunched forward from the back slats, hands folded over his splayed knees, was a black man in his late twenties. Oversize Phat Farm T, wide-legged, many-pocketed carps, thick chains visible around the back of his neck. He was pondering a tiny, purple-winged butterfly perched on the base knuckle of the top thumb of his folded hands.

Lash settled next to him and the butterfly lifted away.

The man gave Lash some skin, rough-palmed and hard-nailed, and said, “M.L.”

“Tricky-Trey,” said Lash. The man’s name was Patrique Molondre, but on the street he went by Tricky. “I’m digging the spot.”

“Bro of mine from the inside hipped me to it. I need more of this peace in my life.”

Some dudes get their minds shaped more by prison than by the chaos of their childhood. The Zen of the pen. The Tao of the dungeon. Time in isolation opens some up to concepts of harmony within a culture of violence. The hidden garden deep within the fortress under siege.

Lash picked at his collar, billowing out his sweatshirt. “Hothouse.”

“Yeah,” said Tricky. “They should be growing weed up in this mo-mo.”

Lash smiled, Tricky having him on. Nice and loose.

They watched two elderly women shuffle past, each with a death grip on her purse. A sign at the exit reminded visitors to check themselves for butterflies in the mirrors before leaving, and when the door opened, a blower came on, keeping the residents inside.

“Minimum security,” said Tricky. “Nobody trying to bust out of this paradise.” He reached over, plucking a reddish orange number off Lash’s shoulder. Held it pinched by its wings. “Brother here got six to ten for unlawful pollination.”

“Butterflies are the white-collar criminals of nature.”

“This boy, he goes out, drinks himself some nectar, has himself a time, right? People say, ‘Oh, well. He don’t know no better, he’s a butterfly.’ But when some fucking big-ass bumblebee buzzes over, sticks his stinger in—look out. Larceny. Shut that mo-mo up in the bee house, give him twenty years, throw away the key.
Cage
his black-and-yellow ass.”

Lash nodded. “Ain’t no justice for a bumblebee.”

Tricky watched the critter try to fly, then opened his fingers and let him go. “I guess you hearing me now?”

“I heard you before, Trick.” Lash sat back. “I just didn’t know. Wasn’t seeing it.”

“Won’t never see nothing till it bleeds out onto the street.” Tricky stayed forward, talking over his hands like a man in church. “They been hitting it hard. I don’t mean ambushing street-corner buys. These ain’t stickups. I mean high-line, pro licks. Takedowns. Inside baseball.”

Tricky let that last part hang out there with the sound of the trickling water.

Lash said, “I’m listening.”

“Nobody knows who, or what. No one I hear from anyway. I sure don’t. But they’re tight. Laying dudes out, rodeo-wrappin’ them, pulling phones and straps.”

“Who they hitting?”

“It’s all vague. Nobody wants to bark about getting punked.
What I do know is, peeps are gearing up. Strapping it on. All that peacetime, turf-respecting shit—that shit is
done
.”

Lash had no real problem with upper-echelon dealers being taken down, per se, but instability concerned him. Innocents and the day players might suddenly find themselves in the cross fire.

“These guys,” said Lash, “these sugar bandits. Are we talking shooters?”

“Naw. Pros. Heavy-hitting pros.”

“Heavy?”

Tricky nodded big, up and down. When he stopped, a little sulfur-yellow butterfly landed on his back. “This dude in the drink. You knew him?”

“Knew
of
him,” said Lash. “You?”

Tricky shrugged.

“A Venezuelan named Vasco.”

Tricky shook his head. The butterfly stayed put. “He don’t shop my side of the street.”

“Chopped off his hands and his tongue.”

“Dude’s tongue?” Tricky clucked his own. “His dick?”

“You know, I didn’t think to check.”

“Everything I hear says these guys are pros. That shit there sounds collateral. The people he got ripped off with, needing to vent some, save face. You got a line on them?”

“I have a few ideas.”

“Then, shizz, you don’t even
need
me.”

Lash smiled. Tricky had grown up in Mattapan, the wild, fully Americanized son of Cape Verdean immigrants, street-running at twelve, enforcing at fifteen, doing drive-bys at seventeen. Lash had never even laid eyes on him before the night he saved his life. Lash was speaking at a “Mattapan Strong!” community meeting, competing with sirens out in the street, when he heard the distinctive
crack-crack
of a gun outside. Everybody in the audience hit the floor as Lash ran out, following the police lights to a lanky kid in long Girbaud shorts lying half off a curb, blood gurgling out of his neck like water out of a playground bubbler. One uniformed and
two plainclothes cops stood around the kid dumbfounded, so Lash badged them and moved in, gripping the kid’s neck tight, closing the circuit, feeling the pumping action against his fingers like someone knocking to get out. Tricky made it through that night, and the next. Lash dropped in on him at the hospital, later showed up at his arraignment, and went on to visit him inside Cedar Junction. Something formed between them as naturally as the scooped pink scar on the side of Tricky’s neck. At one point, Lash even thought he had him hooked, he believed he could pop him free of the street life after his release. But the battle mark on his neck and his time served inside only raised his status, and soon Tricky fell back in with Broadhouse and his crew.

Still, Lash managed to exert some influence over him, prevailing upon Tricky to keep dealers away from schools, away from methadone clinics. Most of all, Lash kept him talking.

Lash folded out a guide he had picked up at the door, about the life of a butterfly. “Nice if people had stages, huh?”

“What now?”

“Four stages, like a butterfly. Says here. Egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult. If we grew in these stages—if there was some door you walked through, saying
NOW ENTERING MANHOOD.
If we were caterpillars before we were butterflies. Learn a little humility. A little self-respect.”

“I know you talking to me.”

“Look at you up in here. Your soul wants this. It wants peace. You could make it work, fool.”

“Always preaching.”

“Pull your shit together. Get some love in your life, boy.”

Tricky turned his head a fraction. “And if I told you, ‘Yo, Lash. Listen up, fool. Get out of the DEA, get into, I don’t know—selling cars. Something regular. Make a change,’ you’d be like, ‘Sho ’nuff. Easy. Here I go.’”

“I hear you, but—”

“Solutions always look good on paper. I got to
make
paper. To sur
vive
.”

“You can cut the movie talk. I saved your black ass once. I can save it again.”

Tricky scowled at the floor as if Lash were a fool. Somehow sensing the butterfly on his back, Tricky shook it away, agitated. “Here’s the thing. They don’t take no powder.”

“You lost me.”

“Cash only, these bandits. No weight.” Tricky was talking out of the side of his mouth. “All’s they take is the green.”

“Hold up, hold up.” Lash watched Tricky’s profile, not getting this. “They’re leaving half the score on the table?”

“Naw. Worse. They
flushing
it, yo. Spoiling it. Queering it up with bleach.”

“What are you saying? Like vigilantes?”

“Like vigilantes getting
paid,
” said Tricky, mashing one hand into the other. “Robin Hoods, robbin’
hoods
.”

“Flushing away half their score? You sure about that?”

“This is what I’m saying. This is a different breed of cat. Not needy or greedy. Maybe it’s simple smarts—’cause that shit can be traced. You put somebody else’s product on the street, you be
found,
and quick. All I know’s, they taking game off the street. Got me thinking maybe it was you.”

The only downside to running a program like Windfall was sheer temptation. Millions of dollars of untraceable cash. The majority of organized sugar bandits out there were dirty cops. This was why Lash cycled manpower in and out of the task force every nine to twelve months. Still, people talked. The enticement was strong. And Lash was ultimately responsible.

Lash said, “I can take care of my own guys.”

“So can I. To a point.”

Lash already knew he wouldn’t go to anyone else in Windfall about this. He’d have to be his own internal affairs—just in case.

“Where’s Broadhouse on this whole thing?” asked Lash.

“Pissed, man. What you think?”

“Gonna be a summit?”

“I don’t have much ear right now, the shit that’s been going
down. Too much fucking distrust going around. To the point where, I fucking don’t
want
to know shit, because everybody’s all looking for leaks. Jumpy. Everybody sniffing out everybody else.”

Three Pins, or drug kingpins, currently stood atop the ever-fluid Greater Boston drug game. Other little players operated at their own discretion and danger, but generally for the past year or two, most of the flow in and around town had to go through three top guys. Broadhouse, based out of Mattapan, Dorchester, and the projects on Mission Hill. Lockerty, out of East Boston and points north. And Crassion, everywhere in between.

“I just want this cleared up,” said Tricky. “These bandits, they got to be
got
.”

Lash squinted. “You trying to get me to do Broadhouse’s work for him now? Are you my inside man, or am I yours?”

Tricky leaned close. “I’m saying this shit’s going to explode. Escalating like the fucking stairs at Macy’s. These mo-mos, you don’t need to make ’em any more paranoid.”

Lash nodded. “On that, we agree.”

Tricky looked him over. “But you say it ain’t you.”

Lash sat on that, surprised. “You really thought so?”

Tricky pulled back, shrugged. “It would be a good play, that’s all. Couldn’t put it past you.” He palmed his knees. “We good here?”

Lash nodded. “We’re good.”

Tricky stood, hiking up his baggy carps. “Stay black, M.L.”

“You stay breathing, Tricky-Trey.”

L
ASH SHRUGGED OFF HIS OVERCOAT AS HE ENTERED THE VISITING
room at MCI Concord, laying it and his scarf across the back of the cleanest-looking chair before sitting down to wait. Monday was the only day they didn’t offer visiting hours, but he had arranged this exception.

Peter Maracone was brought to him from the Special Housing Unit. He wore an extra-large, orange T-shirt over prison jeans,
looking like a double orange Popsicle on two blue sticks. He studied Lash as he sat across the table from him, keeping his eyes beady and putting up a tough front. His hair was stiff and pushed all around as if he were afraid to take a shower.