Devils in Exile (35 page)

Maven said, “They’re not top five in the country. I looked you up.”

“There is currently a three-month waiting list for a bed, and even then, his insurance would cover very little of it.”

Maven lifted the duffel bag onto the counter. He ran the zippers down each end.

The admitting director looked at the cash inside.

“Enough for a full six-month program,” said Maven. “He’s a disabled army veteran. You can move him to the front of the line.”

O
UTSIDE
, M
AVEN HELPED LOAD
R
ICKY OUT OF THE CAR AND INTO A
wheelchair. Ricky looked over at the admitting director, watching them from the building.

“You can do this,” said Maven, kneeling in front of Ricky. “You have to.”

Ricky winced, the thought of a six-month stay worsening his headache. “You’ll take care of my car?”

“I will.”

“You gonna visit?”

“Yeah. I’m gonna visit.”

Ricky looked down into his lap.

Maven said, “Ricky. I know I fucked up a hundred different ways. I’ll carry that with me forever.”

Ricky looked at him—really looked at him—and said, “What about you? What do you do now?”

Maven straightened. “One more thing I gotta do. One last guy I gotta see.”

L
OCKERTY WAS IN HIS UNDERWEAR EATING PASTA AT THE KITCHEN
table. He was a messy eater and didn’t like to feel self-conscious, so he always ate alone. And if the meal involved a red sauce, he ate without too many stainable clothes on.

The television was on next to the refrigerator, but he had the
Boston Phoenix
personals open in front of him, and he was more interested in scanning for some action. By chance, he looked up as the photograph of a young, black boxer was shown on the screen. The words below read, “Brockton Fight Legend in Grisly Discovery.”

The Dynamo. Lewis Termino. Royce’s pit bull.

A grisly discovery?

Lockerty said to the TV, “Are you shitting me?”

The story ended fast. He had come to it too late.

“Mr. Leroy!” he called.

He tried changing stations, but he kept pressing the wrong buttons. He couldn’t find out anything more.

“Mr. Leroy!”

The house was awfully quiet. Nothing more than the sound of water running through the pipes. Lockerty stood, leaving his napkin on the table, downplaying his concern. He moved to the window and looked outside, where dusk was turning to night.

He arrived just in time to see the end of a long shadow running across the yard below.

“Mr. Leroy!”

He took a knife off the table and went to the back stairs, calling for him. The upstairs bathroom door was shut. Lockerty rushed inside with the knife, just as Mr. Leroy was stepping out of the shower.

Mr. Leroy looked at the knife, looked at Lockerty.

Lockerty said, “I think he’s here.”

Mr. Leroy squeezed his blond dreadlocks with a towel, then reached for his pants. “Bringin’ me his other eye.”

M
AVEN WAITED BENEATH THE FRONT PORCH AS
L
OCKERTY’S WATCH
man came to the head of the stairs, looking toward the cars, investigating the noise. When he turned to go back to his padded chair, Maven grasped his ankle from the side, upending him hard. Maven jumped onto the porch in a flash, but the fall had done the job, the watchman out cold.

Inside, Carlo heard Lockerty calling him from upstairs. “A minute!” he yelled back, moving out the front door onto the porch, checking on the bang he had heard and felt. He saw a man lying half on his side at the top of the steps. “Jimmy!” he said, rushing to him.

But it was not Jimmy. It was Maven, and he lifted his hand and shot Carlo twice in the chest.

Mr. Leroy arrived thirty seconds later. He stopped at the threshold of the wide-open front door, seeing Carlo dead on the porch.

Mr. Leroy smiled and started back inside, going to the stairs, gun first.

M
AVEN FOUND THE BEDROOM AT THE END OF THE UPSTAIRS HALLWAY
. The bed he had been strapped to was still there, the lumpy mattress stained and bare. He looked to the window, saw the same leafless tree branches he used to stare at. He went to the window and for the first time saw the ocean beyond, the shore lapping at a narrow beach underneath the low, swelling moon.

He pulled out a knife and slashed open the top of the mattress, exposing springs and old filler. He pulled out a squeeze bottle of lighter fluid and doused the mattress, flipping a lit match at it.

The white Jamaican entered the room barefoot and bare-chested. The flaming mattress compelled his attention, leaving Maven just the extra moment he needed to come at him hard from the side.

He drove Mr. Leroy against the wall, rattling the old window. Mr. Leroy’s gun discharged, the round firing into the floor, the shock of it causing him to take his finger off the trigger. Maven slammed his arm against the wall and the gun popped free. Maven reached for it and quickly tossed it onto the flaming bed.

Mr. Leroy pulled a knife from his pocket, flipped it open, and—before Maven turned back—buried it in Maven’s thigh. His leg screamed, and Mr. Leroy went after Maven’s gun arm and neck, locking up his elbow, forcing Maven toward the flames. Maven pushed back, the knife in his leg weakening and yet hardening him at the same time. The Jamaican had a hand around Maven’s throat, and Maven saw a timepiece around the man’s wrist, and something about it commanded his attention.

An Oris timepiece. Maven’s watch. Seeing it changed everything. Maven pivoted on the painful leg, shifting his weight with a wrathful yell, spinning Mr. Leroy around. He backed the Jamaican toward the flames—near enough that the Jamaican’s dreads began to smolder.

Mr. Leroy let up on Maven’s throat, and Maven shoved away from him, the Jamaican just avoiding the flames. Maven looked down at the knife handle jutting from his thigh and yanked it out in one swift motion. It hurt more coming out than going in. The blade was slick with his blood, and in a moment of madness, staring at Mr. Leroy, Maven licked the silver clean.

Mr. Leroy’s fire-brightened eyes went wide, seeing this. His hair was smoking. Maven advanced, backing him up to the window, not with his gun but with the knife.

M
R
. L
EROY’S HOWLING CHASED
L
OCKERTY FROM HIS HIDING PLACE
inside the house. He rushed out the still-open front door, past Carlo’s dead eyes and down the stairs, past Jimmy lying on the grass, rounding the corner toward the cars with keys in hand.

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.

M
AVEN SAT A FEW YARDS AWAY FROM
L
OCKERTY, 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.

T
HE 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.