The Town: A Novel (24 page)

“Look at you,” Jem said.

Doug watched a hard hat cup a blue pill into his mouth like it was his morning vitamin. The break wagon also sold speed at $3 a pop. Doug remembered the jolt of a blue with a beer back, ten or ten thirty in the morning, kicking the workday into gear. “What?”

“You.”

“What?”

“All the way up here, you’re in fucking La-La Land. You get laid last night?”

“Yeah. I wish.”

“Anybody I know? He do you right?”

Doug smiled in spite of himself, watching the dust spreading in the distance.

“What is it, then?” said Jem. “You found Jesus or something?”

“I did. In a condo over on Eden Street. Nice place.”

“Yeah, I hear he’s a good carpenter. I would of thought maybe you ran into him at the Tap.”

Doug went cold under the white sun. “What are you talking about?”

“Splash the bartender said he thought he saw you in there, few nights before.”

“That Saturday night, all of us?”

“No, fuckhead. Recent.”

A dismissive shrug, a good one. “Different Doug MacRay.”

“I see. Maybe the
old
Doug MacRay, come back to us like Jesus on Eden Street. All I can say is, you
better
not be drinking on the side. I been waiting too fucking long. Your first drink back, I’m there at your elbow, or else.”

Relief seeping in. “Speaking of abstinence—how’s that going for you?”

“I remain pure.”

“Get the fuck.”

“My mother’s grave.”

“Yikes, that’s where you do it?”

“I’m pulling two full workouts a day. Check these guns.”

“Hey, cowboy—all the same to you, I’m gonna take a pass on standing here, checking out your shoulder hard-ons.”

Jem studied him one-eyed in the sun. “You got laid, motherfuck. Come clean.”

Doug smiled big. “I always do.”

The whistle blew the all clear and Jem found his hat under his arm. “Let’s go see Boner and get this shit over with.”

In the distance, a demo crew in hard hats, goggles, and face masks advanced on the settling dust. Doug could smell the grit from where he was, remembering the feeling of it stopping up his pores. “You ever miss this?”

Jem twirled his helmet like he used to, the
J. Coughlin
fading on the back, the head strap inside worn to the foam. “You fucking kidding me?”

“I miss it a little. Not the commute, the bullshit, eating lunch out of a truck, fucking dust in my hair.”

“You like blowing shit up.”

“No. I just like watching it fall.”

“Well, second thought, going at a wall with a crowbar, that wasn’t so bad either. The old wrecking crew, right? Hammers, sledges, and pickaxes. Walking into some condemned building in our dusted overalls like,
‘Warriors, come out to play-ayy …’”

Doug shrugged. “I just liked watching it fall.”

Inside the construction trailer, they waited for Billy Bona, Billy saying, “Yup… yeah… sure… ,” into the phone and strangling the cord in his hands. Ten years before, while tearing out a condemned building alongside Doug, a falling cinder block claimed the nails of the last three fingers of his left hand. Doctors told him they would grow back twice as thick, but they never grew back at all. Now Billy was the demo foreman in his father’s company and only used his helmet-less fingers for pointing at guys and signing things.

He hung up and came across to shake hands. “The original thick-dick micks.”

Doug said, “Billy Boner.”

Jem said, “’S’up, Little Italy?”

“You know how it is,” said Boner, sliding a clipboard off his desk, “this and that, that and this. I got two minutes here, literally. What’s the squeal?”

Doug said, “Highway project, huh?”

Jem was twiddling Boner’s Rolodex like a kid on a visit to his dad’s office. “This economy, I take it where it comes,” said Boner, distracted, not liking his cluttered desk touched. “What you got? Potato famine suddenly? Coming back to do some real work?”

“Never, man,” said Jem. “Just wanted to go over terms of our deal.”

Boner frowned, looked at Doug, concerned. “Fuck’s wrong with the deal?”

Jem held up a
Bonafide Demo
paperweight showing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. “Know what I’d like to see on this instead?” he said. “That chef from the pizza boxes, twiddling his Rollie Fingers mustache, you know? That would be good.”

Boner said to Doug, “What’s going on here, MacRay?”

Doug had forgotten Jem’s sourness toward Boner, it had been that long. “It’s all good, Billy,” said Doug, dropping
Boner
for the moment. “Nothing wrong with the deal. Everything’s cool.”

“’Cause your guard dog here is slobbering all over my desk.”

Jem smiled his smile, challenge accepted, and went around to sit in Boner’s big chair, putting his mud-caked boots up on the desk. “Seat’s a little hard, Boner. Your ass is much more accommodating than mine.”

Boner gripped his clipboard two-handedly. “If this is some fuckin’ poor man’s shakedown, you can both—”

“Whoa, whoa,” said Doug. “Hold on. How well you know me?”

“
Used
to know you good, Duggy. Going way back. So what the fuck?”

Doug said to Jem, “Get out from behind the man’s desk,” just to be polite, not really expecting Jem to move, which he didn’t. Doug said to Boner, “Everything with the arrangement is going great, everything’s fine. We just think we might be hearing hoofbeats, so to speak, so we wanted to come up here, make sure all our bases are covered.”

“A reminder,” said Jem, picking up a pad of pink phone-message slips, flipping it at Boner. Boner made no move to catch it and the pad bounced off his arm, falling to the floor.

“Not a reminder,” said Doug. “A courtesy call, let you know you might have visitors coming up here with badges, questions. Or maybe not, we don’t know.”

“Jesus,” sighed Boner, not needing this hassle.

“You been making a tiny little mint off us,” said Jem, sitting up behind Boner’s desk. “Keeping us on the books, paying us full sal, us kicking half back to you.”

“Keeping you outta
jail,
sounds like, giving you taxable income for the IRS.” He looked back at Doug. “And what, an alibi?”

“Maybe,” said Doug. “But mostly just gainful employ. Our good citizenship. They got nothing pinned on us, ’cept their own ambitions. So you don’t have to worry about a thing. We just didn’t want anyone coming up here and throwing you, catching you off guard. All you need to do is pledge us as two of your contract guys.”

“Your very best contract guys,” said Jem. “Good workers and nice fellows, handsome guys. Only out sick that day.”

“And then let us know. That cool, Billy?”

Boner nodded. His glance at the wall clock told Doug that Boner was busy and this was no big thing to him, which was all Doug wanted to know.

Jem said, “Boner’s cool. ’Course, he’s got no fucking other choice anyway.”

Boner wheeled and pointed with a finger off his clipboard, sputtering. “Why you so fuckin’ hot all the time, Jimmy? I mean, what the
fuck
?”

Doug explained, “He gave up jerking off.”

“Yeah? Traded it for
being
a jerkoff,” said Boner, having had all he could stand. “You never showed my dad any respect, you fucking hump.”

“Respect?” said Jem, hands folded, still seated, too calm and comfortable. “That’s all you ever showed him, fuckin’ daddy’s little girl. Taking over the business so he can head off down to Florida.”

“Seems like you inherited your daddy’s business too.”

Jem bounded up and around the desk, up into Boner’s face with the chair back still rocking. Doug stayed where he was, so fucking tired of it all.

“You think I’m afraid of you?” said Boner, the clipboard at his hip now. “Huh? Yeah? Well you’re goddamn fucking right I’m afraid of you, you half-a-psycho.” Boner backed off and picked his message pad off the floor—then whipped it at the papers on his desk, slapping down his clipboard and bouncing a pen off his phone.

He stopped, facing his vacant chair, shoulders riding his anger. “You two came here to tell me something, and now you told me, and now I’ve got some real fucking work to do. Guys under me who actually work for their paychecks, guys with families to feed,
earning
their salaries.”

He turned back looking for some trace of shame in their faces and, failing that, banged out of the thin trailer door empty-handed.

B
ACK INSIDE THE FLAMER
, Jem’s beat-up Trans Am, driving south from Billerica to the Wendy’s parking lot off the highway where Doug had left his Caprice. No tail either way, and they had been super-fucking-careful—but instead of relief, this only increased Doug’s paranoia. He made a mental note to
recheck his wheel wells and firewalls and poke around under the hood for tracking beacons.

Jem drove eager-eyed, tearing up the road. He tried the radio and a
Sesame Street
tune blasted out of the speakers. “Jesus
fuck,
” he said, hitting Eject and tossing the tape into the backseat like it was on fire. “See that? That’s why I don’t fucking let her use my car. She wanted me to put a
baby
seat in back there, full-time? Yeah, like Jem’s cruising around Town with that chick magnet.”

He wheeled onto the highway, the white sun glaring off the gaudy blue-on-blue flame work on the hood, bouncing into Doug’s eyes. Their helmets rolled around the piles of crap in back like the aggravation rattling inside Doug’s head.

“So what about the Dez situation?” said Jem.

“What about it?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Okay.”

“Of all of us, he’s the weak link.”

“Dez is fine, I told you.”

“When’s he been proven? A fucking
candy
store, even—the kid’s never put gum in his pocket without paying for it. How’s he gonna stand up under a grilling, told to turn us over or else? Where’s his track record on that?”

Doug wasn’t so annoyed that he couldn’t find some truth in this.

“And what about the manager?”

“The bank manager?” said Jem.

“No, Don Zimmer. Yes, the bank manager. Said you’d have something there.”

“There’s nothing there. A dead end. Done.”

“You think so.”

“I know so. I can fucking guarantee so.”

“How?”

“She checks out. Don’t worry about it.”

Jem switched lanes, slicing between two cars with maybe six inches to spare on either end. “So there’s no need to remove her from the equation, then.”

Doug turned to him, Jem’s stupidity as blinding as the sun. “Are you fucking
kidding
me?”

“I’m just saying.”

“You’re just saying what? What are you just saying? You’re a fucking contract killer now?”

Jem shrugged, playing tough guy. “I don’t like loose ends.”

Doug had to take a breath and remind himself that this was all just talk, part of the movie playing twenty-four hours a day on the cable channel in Jem’s head. “Listen, De Niro. You need to start jerking off again. And I mean fucking pronto, like right now, pull over, I’ll wait. Fuck’s gotten into you? The music all night—”

“What, is it too loud?”

“Is it too
loud
?”

“Awright, whatever, what the fuck.”

“Turn down the volume in your head, kid. What is it? Vampire bite you or something?”

“Just trying to be careful.”

“Let me be the paranoid one, all right? Let me do the worrying. Cool it.”

“Fuckin’… it’s cool, man. It’s cool.”

They were quiet for a while, Doug’s head ringing, Jem rolling down his window to spit.

“So, Gloansy’s wedding, huh?”

“Yeah,” said Doug.

“Who you taking? Got anything set up?”

Doug shook his head. “I’m nowhere on that one.”

“Yeah.” Then: “Krista has no date neither.”

Doug stared ahead, letting it pass.

“What else’re you doing with your time?”

“Why, what the fuck? What are you poking at me for?”

“Poking at you?” said Jem. “What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know—what are
you
talking about?”

“See—this is you between jobs.” Jem nodded like one of them was crazy and it wasn’t him. “Time off for you is no fucking good, time off for
any
of us.” He palmed the wheel, pushing the car ahead. “Speaking of time. Mac, last weekend—he was asking for you.”

“Yeah?” said Doug, wondering where the hell this was suddenly coming from. “Yeah, how’s he been?”

“Good, good. Says he wants you to come by sometime.”

“Yeah. I been meaning to.”

“Says he don’t like to ask, but he wants to see your face. Wants to know what’s up, I guess. I said I’d tell you.”

“Sure,” said Doug, already angling to duck it. There was a latent smudge on his side window, brought out by the sun: a little round handprint, dead center, and Doug wondered what the fuck Shyne was doing riding around in the front seat with no belt on.

Jem said, “You know I get the fuckin’ biggest kick outta your dad.”

“Yeah,” said Doug, thinking,
You’re the only one
—his eyes staying trained on the oily ghost of a tiny little uncreased palm.