Devils in Exile (16 page)

“Sure you are. This, here in the States, it’s Candy Land. This is a dream. A fantasy compared to over there, which was reality. Cold reality. But here comes the bitterest irony. Over there, in the real
world, you had power. A rifle in your hand, a flag on your shoulder. Over there, you were a king. But back here in fantasyland, you’re like anybody else. Only less so, because you’ve been gone so long, you’re a couple of steps behind. See? All backwards. In reality, a king. In fantasy, a peasant. A dangerous fucking peasant. A peasant who knows what it is to be a king.” Royce leaned closer again. “That seem right to you?”

Maven tried to inhale a little sobriety, feeling over his head here. “No, but—we’re winning, right? We’re beating the system.”

“Absolutely we are. For now. But what happens next?”

“Next what?”

“It’s just common sense. Things can’t go on like this forever, right? Things are going to reach a critical mass at some point. Then what? Do we call it a day? Or is there another stage in the evolution?”

Maven turned his head for a different angle of understanding, but it didn’t work. He looked down at the new timepiece on his wrist instead, the second-hand needle doing a slow lap around the face. “I don’t really want to think about what comes next.”

“You’re crazy not to. Why?”

Maven shook his head.

Royce made a face. “Tell.”

“You’ll think I’m a jinx.”

“If I ever believed in that sort of thing, I wouldn’t be here now.”

“I’m just waiting for the worm to turn.”

“Go on.”

“Look, I’m not being ungrateful. I’m extremely grateful. For the opportunity, for this beer—for fucking everything. But the thing is—trouble has a way of finding me.”

Royce sat back, not perplexed, not amused. “That so.”

“Historically, yeah.”

“You’re saying you got the mark on you. So how do you explain all this good fortune in your life now?”

“Exactly. It’s all tits and butter. That’s what’s got me worried.”

“That you never had it this good?”

“Never in my life.”

Royce finished his beer. He looked disappointed—or maybe that was just Maven’s impression, as he felt he was always giving Royce wrong answers. “Who knows, Maven?” said Royce, standing up with his empty bottle. “Maybe your luck has changed.”

L
ASH RECOGNIZED THE FAMILIAR MUSK OF STUPIDITY UPON ENTER
ing the Barnstable County lockup and decided he had been spending entirely too much time in jails. He feared becoming like a career garbageman whose nose can no longer discriminate between sweet and sour.

This, he thought, as he looked at the faces of the men doubled up in the cells, is the side of the Cape that few people see. Turns out it’s not all sand dunes and ice cream shops. He was buzzed through another door and found the Harleton cat’s cell wide-open. Overweight, white, the executive type, dumping toiletries off the wall shelf into a plastic bag.

Lash said, “Hi, there.”

The guy turned, startled, seeing Lash filling the open door. A man walking freely inside the lockup. Harleton looked behind Lash, expecting others. “Who are you?”

“I’m Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, how you doing?”

The guy shrank back, a dry toothbrush in his hand. He was on
the verge of walking out of this place, and now here was a black man in his cell messing with him. “They said my lawyer is coming.”

Lash looked around. “Not here yet.”

Harleton appeared pained, waiting to be let in on the joke. “I don’t know who you are.”

“Let’s just say that I’m an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. And let’s just say that you were found three days ago all trussed up in your family’s home on some island-sized golf course, along with three known heroin dealers and eleven pounds of weed.”

Harleton’s mouth flinched, his eyes cheating around the room in anticipation of a beating. “My lawyer is on his way.”

“You said that. I guess your family popped for bail. Very considerate, in light of the circumstances. Very forgiving. I gotta tell you, my son played host to a drug deal in my house while I was away in Florida? He’d be coming up with his own damn bail money.”

“I’m sure you don’t know anything about my family—”

“But I know about you, Mr. Harleton. You’re the fuckup son, a grown man still taking help from parents he doesn’t respect. But I’m not here to scold you. I wouldn’t waste my motherfucking breath.” Lash cursed because Harleton expected it from him. Lash had no problem being his scary stereotype. “I don’t even care about your case. Someone else will handle it, and they will be left holding the bag when you screw. Now, don’t give me that shocked look—you think I don’t know you’re going to run?”

Harleton was over his initial fear, his mind-set back to
A man like me doesn’t belong in a place like this.
Lawyers had been consulted, bail had been posted. The world he knew was righting itself like a good ship in a storm. “Run where?”

“Like I said, somebody else’s problem. Two days is a good long time to be tied up, isn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Your parents know you better than you think. Two days without hearing from you, and they call the police, ask that their house be checked. Osterville cops find you bound up with a bunch of
felons and weed. One of the felons was beat-up. They recovered a casing and a round on the floor—and yet no firearms anywhere in the house. The round was scored and mashed, meaning it had been fired and impacted with something—and no bullet holes in the house. They found heroin movers and heroin buyers—and yet no money and no heroin. See a pattern here?”

Harleton kept mum.

“I’m not here about you. I’m here about the guys who ripped you off.”

Harleton’s eyes, accustomed to a lifetime of blinking and prevarication, held firm.

“These other shits you were with, they’ll deny anything occurred.
Especially
after going to such lengths
not
to get taken. The island. This gated little golf sanctuary. Only to be made fools of. Which is where you come in. One bridge connects to the mainland, and the guy at the gate, he checks names. So your guests, they had reason to feel pretty secure. But they didn’t pay enough attention to the beach, huh?”

Lash started to pace inside the small cell. He wasn’t even looking at Harleton now, Lash putting all this together in front of him. Harleton’s role in Lash’s ratiocination was that of the finger around which a knot was being tied.

“Coming in by water. That shows skills. Were there four or five of them?”

Lash didn’t need straight-out answers. Just being near the guy allowed him to see. In the way a psychic worries a possession of the recently disappeared, or a bloodhound pokes his nose in a shirt. This was why Lash had come all the way out to Cape Cod.

“I’m betting the shot came from your side. Because the round was blunted, like it hit Kevlar and bounced away. That explains the guy getting smacked around. He got a shot off … and yet he wasn’t killed in retaliation. That’s enormous restraint, isn’t it? Heat of the moment? These guys are disciplined, they’re patient, they’re prepared. And plenty well equipped. A lot of which says cops. But the amphibious stuff—no. Maybe federal … ?” Lash played this
out in his mind. “Maybe some rogue tactical team, freelancing. Or
ex
-agents. But how do they
know
? Field intel. That’s the fucking weak link here, that’s the key. If I can find any agency, local or federal, that was onto you”—Lash pointed to Harleton, still standing with his back against the far wall—“or those others … a snitch somewhere … somebody undercover …”

Harleton relaxed a little more. Now he’d had some time to think. “Cops?”

Lash looked up at him. “That surprises you. They didn’t seem like cops? Do cop shit?”

Harleton clamped up again.

Lash returned to his pacing. “That’s the one part that doesn’t play, isn’t it? Cops who turn like this, they hide behind the badge. Who wouldn’t? You’re gonna go dirty, why play fair? You’re gonna use the golden key that opens every door in town. And there’s a big difference between taking a shot at some guy trying to rip you off, versus capping a fed. About a life’s sentence difference.”

Lash looked back at Harleton, the man wearing a funny, distant-looking smile on his face.

Lash said, “You’re wondering about cops. Thinking this could help you, help your case. Only thing is—I’m not even going to bother talking to your known associates. So if you go blabbing any of this to your lawyer, they’ll know you were the source, and they’ll think you were talking to us feds.” Lash made a
snick
noise with his cheek. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll kill you anyway. For knowing they got taken—for
seeing
it. They don’t like that. Maybe you lost money too, maybe you financed some of this hijacked cake. Though I doubt it. These aren’t your people. This is more like you owe them something. Like you’ve been living out on the wild side. That it, tubby?”

The guy was getting pissed. Lash should have stopped there but he couldn’t pull back. This guy in front of him was the embodiment of his own nightmare about raising a son.

“Vengeful little kid cutting up Mommy’s dresses. When you screw out of here, jumping bail and fleeing the country, who’s
going to pay? As always, your beautiful, loving parents. Only this time, they’re going to pay in bullets. I’m sure the last thing they’ll be thinking about is their son, whose fat finger is practically pulling the trigger. Thinking that maybe they should have handled you differently. That maybe getting you out of trouble isn’t the same as raising you right.”

Harleton looked as if a stopper in his throat had been pulled, the crust of recalcitrance and malfeasance that clogged his head beginning to drain down. He looked as contrite as he’d ever been in his entire life. And yet Lash knew it wouldn’t last. He’d still go off running with his parents’ lives in his pockets like the gold from their teeth, and crying all the way.

Lash said, as he turned to leave, “Thanks, you’ve been a help.”

C
URTIZ KNOCKED ON
L
ASH’S DOOR, CARRYING IN HIS BACKGROUND
work on Vasco, the Venezuelan they had pulled out of the thawed Charles River. They called this a digital profile, outlining the last days of a dead man via his electronic echo.

Curtiz focused on Vasco’s credit card purchases and mobile phone records.

“We never found the phone,” said Lash.

“Tracked his number via his e-mail account. It was a U.S. phone. GPS triangulation puts the phone at the Sheraton Boston on Dalton Street when it went dead.”

“He was registered at the Boston Harbor Hotel.” Lash turned his Zippo over and over in his hand. The map of Vietnam inscribed on the back had all but worn smooth. “I don’t suppose GPS can give us a room number?”

“Only reads horizontally. But I went in and had them go back through the register for that day, they gave me this printout. See there?”

Curtiz had highlighted the name
Maracone,
a two-night registration in a junior suite on the twenty-ninth floor.

“No complaints from the hotel that day, nothing logged anyway. But there was a housekeeping note saying that the telephone was gone from the room and had to be replaced. The charge was added to the bill.” Curtiz handed Lash a copy of Maracone’s room bill. “Maybe they cut the room phone and disabled all the mobiles, including Vasco’s. Makes sense, right?”

“Perfect sense,” said Lash.

“Here’s the other peculiar thing. See his call log? It’s summarized there on the first page. His minutes don’t add up. More airtime used than total logged calls.”

Lash flipped through the pages. “Phone company mistake?”

“Could be. They never made a mistake on my bill though. You want to leave it at that?”

Lash shook his head. “I guess I don’t.”

H
E WAS LOOKING FOR A MAN NAMED
S
CHRAMM WHO SOLD
G
OTHIC
and Celtic jewelry out of a cart set up near the
Cheers
bar reproduction at Faneuil Hall. Lash poked around, eating a soft-serve ice cream cone, while Schramm flirted with two truant teens shopping for pewter pendants and sterling-silver belly rings.

The waiting allowed Schramm to make Lash as a cop. Once the girls moved along, Schramm went up to him and said, “Look, man, I’m out of it. I did my bid.”

“I have only come here seeking knowledge. Somebody gave me your name.”

Schramm wore a winged-reaper ring on his middle finger, a death’s-head pin sewn into the skin over his right temple. “Can I see the shield?”

Lash obliged.

“So we’re talking casually here, then?”

“So casual.” Lash showed him the printout with the airtime discrepancy. “What am I looking at, a cloned phone?”

“Nobody clones phones, not anymore. Too traceable now that
carriers do radio fingerprinting. It catches clones by picking up the unique rise time signature—”

“If you could,” said Lash, putting up the stop sign, “just put it in layman’s terms, and then maybe step it down another couple of notches. I’m moving through this digital world at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.”

Schramm made a forget-that motion with his hands. “For the minute numbers to be off, that means somebody had to mess with the internal chip. You do that, you can change a device made for transmitting into an actual broadcaster. A RAT phone, or remote access tool. You control it remotely, usually by sending an SMS—I mean, a text message. You can intercept calls, but more to the point, you can turn a phone into a microphone. Like a bug. You can listen in. Takes a little know-how, but the most important thing is access. Setting up the target phone. You either need to give your mark a tampered phone, or else physically get your hands on theirs for a certain amount of time.”

“Okay, so—somebody close.”

“Somebody close. Or else a real good thief.”

Lash chewed on that. “They use this in law enforcement?”

“You don’t know?”

“Told you, I’m made of vinyl. These lines you see in my face are analog grooves.”