Devils in Exile (12 page)

“Who’re you?”

“Me?” Lash said. “I am the Ghost of Drug Deals Past.”

The guy frown-smiled. “Thought ghosts were white.”

“The good ghosts are. I’m a bad spirit.”

“Why ain’t I scared?”

“Maybe you got an alibi for last November?”

“Last November? Let me check. The whole month?” Maracone thought about what that question might mean to him. “I suppose I could get one.”

“How much you get taken for?”

Maracone did the exaggerated head tilt, suddenly hard of hearing. “What’s that?”

“A lot, huh? Too bad. They tie you up? You must have pissed yourself.”

Maracone’s eyes stayed narrow but receded farther into his skull. “Was it you, you piece of shit?”

“Me? Huh.” That got Lash thinking. “Were all of them black, or just some?”

“Fuck you.”

“Okay. Not all then. More than one?”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Just one. Got it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m in here for a domestic dispute.”

“Whipping your girlfriend with an extension cord. You’re all class, Petey.”

Maracone folded his pudgy fingers on the scratched-up table, going quiet, tired of getting outtalked.

Lash said, “You used a table saw on his hands, huh?”

Maracone smiled. Just a little one, his clownish fat face. “I’ll let you know when what you’re saying starts making sense to me.”

That smile was exactly what Lash had come for. Confirmation. Assholes can never help but congratulate themselves.

Lash said, “Your brother, where’s he at?”

“Sport fishing in F-L-A.”

“Hiding out, in other words. I guess he’s the smart one.” Lash sat back. “You’re obviously very busy here, Petey, trying not to get raped, so I’ll just ask you one more question, straight up. You and your brother were looking to become players, buying in big, and fell flat on your face. So you took out the Venezuelan in anger—fine. But you two don’t have the juice to jump into the game so big like that. Somebody was fronting you. Who?”

Maracone kept his hands folded, deciding to say nothing.

“Lockerty,” said Lash. “Yep. That’s what I’ll tell people you told me.”

“Fuck you. I didn’t tell you shit.”

“Lockerty. That’s what you said.”

Maracone almost levitated out of his chair. “You fucking trying to get me killed? What is this?”

Lash smiled. “Petey, reading you is like reading the front page of
USA Today
. Too fucking easy.”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“Sure you did.” Lash stood, grabbed his coat.

“What the fuck was this? Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

Lash smiled, laying his scarf down soft against the late-day roughness of his neck. “That should have been your first question.”

“It fucking was!”

Lash walked back outside to his car, needing to find a place to eat with a nice bathroom where he could wash the prison off his hands.

TWO DOZEN KILOS OF SCAG AND A FEW POUNDS OF WEED ARRIVED
on Cape Cod on a trawler from Florida. It was off-loaded early in the day along with a legit bluefin haul, but the dock wasn’t the transaction point. The deal had to be physically consummated. Credit deals were rare, as any misunderstandings or miscommunications quickly led to bloodshed. Banks were almost never involved because the law loved paper trails and electronic records. The hand-to-hand exchange was the point of highest risk for both dealer and buyer.

In this brief moment of vulnerability, this synapse of paper and powder, lived the sugar bandits.

Osterville Grand Island is a circular land mass located just off the triceps of Cape Cod. A private, gated community of 150 homes and an exclusive golf course, accessible only by a two-lane drawbridge, past a guard who takes names.

The wayward fortyish son of an oil-corporation executive owed the wrong people a lot of money. Playing host to a secure-site trans
action would not forgive his staggering debt, but would extend the grace period for its repayment. He had e-mailed the gate guard the names of a plumber and of a tile company who he said were coming that night to repair a bathroom-pipe rupture.

Traffickers making adjustments out of fear was the clearest evidence yet of the bandits’ influence on the drug trade.

Termino was the point man in Royce’s absence. He, Maven, Glade, and Suarez ditched their kayaks on a sandy barrier beach of low dunes named Dead Neck, entering the frigid water in insulated neoprene and dive boots, swimming out into Cotuit Bay under cover of night. A breakwater calmed the surf as they snorkeled around the west end of the island, one hundred meters off the densely wooded shore, each man tugging a watertight bag strung from a gas-filled bob.

They cut in toward the fifth dock from the turn, floating easily and watching the house lights through the oaks, monitoring the shore for any activity. Satisfied with the stillness, they walked out of the water onto beach grass and opened their wet bags, exchanging snorkels and dive masks for light vests, balaclavas, and weapons. Maven made sure his 9 mm MP5 submachine gun was moisture-free, then extended the butt stock of the hybrid handgun-rifle. The others pulled on their masks and started up the dune on either side of the wooden stairway, looking every bit like amphibious commandos.

This drill they had repeated each of the previous four nights. They knew the layout of the property, they knew everything.

The others took entry. Maven went alone through pines to the front of the estate, spotting the lookout halfway down the curling drive of crushed white seashells. He stood on the near side, allowing Maven to come up on him silently over grass, catching the goon on the side of the head just as he started to turn around. Maven relieved him of a handgun and a Nextel mobile, then bound him in ZipCuffs and a gag and loaded him into the back of the tile truck parked before the three-car garage.

A glance through the windows revealed that the dealmakers had
been subdued. His all clear was three taps on the glass, masked Termino responding with a nod. Maven then did a full perimeter walk before entering, making double sure there was only one lookout.

Four men lay prone on the floor. The one guy freaking out wore navy blue corduroys, a collared shirt, and a kelly green whale belt: the homeowner’s son. Guns and mobiles were set out on a wide coffee table with ammo mags and phone batteries removed. The bags of heroin were piled on the granite counter in the center island of the kitchen, smelling like the seafood section of Stop & Shop. Glade transferred cash into two large backpacks.

Suarez ran the kitchen sink, washing down the scag and chasing it with Drano. The bags of pot they left on the floor. The homeowner’s son—receding hairline, the stink of failure all over him like the dead-fish smell—continued to whine under his gag, wanting to register a sternly worded complaint.

Maven made a circuit of the ground floor. Paneled walls, museum-quality lighting, inch-thick rugs. He looked at a large, carefully drafted map of the island, hand-lettered and handsomely mounted, an antique from its legitimate oystering days. The owner’s son was a broker who had been “borrowing” from the family money entrusted to his care to fund his own vices and crude interests—money he planned to earn back twofold through risky investments, none of which had yet panned out. The family was down in Hialeah; they didn’t know this yet.

Maven was in the front of the house, looking at the old seaman’s map that now hung on the wall—one man’s tool another man’s trophy—when he heard a sound out of place. A creak. A step.

He started toward the intersecting hallways, keeping his dive boots silent on the thick rugs. As he turned the corner toward the shore side of the house, he saw a crouched form emerging from an old servants’ set of stairs. He saw a handgun silhouetted against the kitchen light as the body sprang forward.

The gunman got off a single round before Maven plowed him over with a forearm to the back of his head. The man hit the floor
with such force that the gun in his hand cracked in two at the wooden grip.

Maven dropped a knee into the man’s back, turning to see where the shot had gone.

Suarez was on one knee before the sink, neck arched in pain, one hand gripping his back.

His vest had absorbed the round. Suarez’s face went dark when he realized what had happened, and he straightened in pain, pulling his MAC-10 machine pistol off the kitchen counter in a blind rage. He turned to execute the shooter—but Maven collapsed on the unconscious man, shielding him with his own vested back until Glade and Termino intervened.

Maven ZipCuffed the shooter and they finished fast, taking the money, phones, and weapons and leaving the way they had come, down the grassy elevation to the sand at the empty dock. Masks and guns went into wet bags with the cash, snorkel gear coming back out.

Suarez was grunting in pain, still muttering under his breath. The gun report had put a pealing into Maven’s ears like a distant alarm. He was knee-deep in the frigid water, towing out the bad guys’ guns and phones, when Suarez hooked his arm, hard.

Maven turned fast, responding to the grip. But instead of anger, he saw gratitude.

“Thanks, man,” said Suarez.

For knocking out the shooter, and for stopping Suarez from killing him. Maven clapped him on the chest and they pushed out into the water.

Halfway to Dead Neck, Maven sank the bag of guns and phones to the bottom of the bay.

M
AVEN CAME UP FROM THE SINK WITH HIS FACE DRIPPING, STARING
at himself in the restroom mirror. The water dribbling off his chin, the tightness of his sore muscles, brought him back to that night
before, the job on the Cape. Despite two hot showers, he could still smell salt water on his hands. The sick feeling he had got when he saw the shooter emerge from the shadows was still with him.

It could happen that quickly, that easily. One slipup. Game over.

He dried his face, taking a squirt of cologne from the complimentary dispenser on the counter, patting his neck and jaw. Salt water is good for the complexion, it turned out. His neck was smooth and clean, no razor burn, nothing. He looked strong and ridiculously healthy. That was what money did for you.

He accepted a linen towelette from the black-jacketed attendant. “Thanks, brother,” said Maven, depositing a finsky into the glass tip bowl.

“Thank
you,
sir,” said the attendant, opening the restroom door.

Maven stepped into the swirl of light and sound that was Precipice. Royce said that the best nightclubs maintain just the right mixture of sexy and sinister. Precipice had that: walking through it was like patrolling a dark cloud during a lightning storm. The pulsating lights, the music thumping from the walls, that pheromonal musk of sweat and perfume and alcohol that was pure sexual incense: every club had these things, but here the mix achieved a sort of exotic frenzy.

The VIP room included a catwalk overlooking the downstairs dance floor. Red velvet curtains draped doorways leading to interconnected rooms, some so dark you couldn’t guess their dimensions upon entering. As many times as he’d been here, Maven still, at least once each night, lost his way.

The club was located on the edge of the Theater District, before it gave over into Chinatown. The outrageous $60 cover charge weeded out students and barhoppers, who could find what they were looking for on Lansdowne or Boylston Street at one-sixth the price and one-tenth the hassle. Unaccompanied women were admitted free if they looked the part, and judging by the traffic-stopping scrum outside, looking the part was apparently the goal of half the twenty-one-year-olds in town.

Maven circumvented the balcony and ducked off into one of the velvet curtains, searching for a smaller bar. Indigo neon light signaled it, and he made his way to the corner rail, yelling out an order for a Seven and Seven and laying a fifty on the bar.

The music was less pounding in here. To his immediate left stood a Middle Eastern guy in his early twenties. Charcoal suit jacket, red silk shirt. Army age, for sure. Possibly Iranian or even Iraqi, impossible to tell in the cool blue light. Precipice hosted its share of layabout Euro trash and Middle Eastern money. Maven eyed him via the mirror backing the bar. Fate put a cocktail in one man’s hands and a rifle in another’s. In another room halfway across the world, Maven and this guy might have been enemy combatants. Here they were just two more guys on the make.

Their drinks arrived together, and Maven paid for both. He pulled out his lime wedge and stirrer and left them on the bar napkin, toasting the guy with a quick nod before pushing off from the bar and heading away.

“Mave!”

Just past the curtain at the next doorway, Jimmy Glade stood bookended by two ladies in thigh-length dresses, all bare shoulders and full legs, each with a bit of glitter mixed with the color on their cheeks. One blonde standout and her more eager brunette friend.

Milkshake shouted introductions, Maven shaking each woman’s warm little hand.

Realtors, were they, Maven and Glade. Housemates in a condo on Marlborough Street. Glade had already hit all the selling points. “Their first time here!” shouted Glade, showing Maven his
Jackpot!
face.

Milkshake should have been a military recruiter. There wasn’t much to Jimmy Glade—he was big and square-headed and more goofy than funny—but he had confidence, and he had a strategy. A few months back, Glade had generously offered to take Maven under his wing. Maven’s experience chatting up hot girls in clubs was zilch. For a time he picked up Glade’s routine, his patter. Most guys were hesitant to approach girls in pairs, in threes, but that
was Glade’s comfort zone, that was where he worked best, playing girlfriends off each other. Flattering questions (“What would you say is her most attractive feature?”). Soliciting opinions (“Which do you prefer, somebody who plays the game, or a guy who calls you right away?”). Sparking competition (“So which one of you is the smartest?”). Everything he did worked. That was the insane thing. Granted, sharp clothes and flash money helped too. As did copious amounts of alcohol. Bizarrely, so did borderline insults (“Your hair is getting a little crazy there.”) and heavy-handed divisive ploys (“I’m trying to figure out which one of you has the prettier smile.”). If you establish a competitive situation, women will compete. That was his secret. Glade was never the object of their desire, merely the facilitator. By challenging them, by provoking jealousies and conflicts—exposing the rivalry inherent in most female friendships—he established a contest wherein he was both referee and grand prize.