The Town: A Novel (28 page)

T
HE MORNING WAS WET
, the rising sun burning off shadows and dampness, raising street steam. Through the cat’s cradle of power and phone wires, falling to eye level as Sackville Street plunged headlong into the Mystic, a barge was being unloaded by tall, pecking cranes. Gulls coasted overhead, dipping and swirling around Doug’s mother’s house, threatening to shit.

When his father had first lost the house, Doug was so pissed he didn’t come around for years, avoiding Sackville Street altogether. The life he was leading then, that of a drinking man, offered little solace, his mind stewing in boyhood memories and associations, rather than drawing on their strength. But during his stay at MCI Norfolk, all thoughts of home, of the Town, centered around his mother’s house. Not the Monument, not Pearl Street, not the rink. Her house was the first place he visited after his release. The Town was his mother. The Town had raised him. This house was her face, watching over him. These streets were her arms, holding him close.

Acting impulsively had been the hallmark of Doug’s drinking years, and never had it come to any good. He always wound up hurting people. How had he thought this was going to end any differently?

It was the lottery mentality. Something he had been working so hard to suppress these past three years: the all-or-nothing play, going after that “marquee score.” It was something else he had inherited from the Town, like his eyes and his face: a gambler’s dream of that one sweet score that would change everything forever.

He preached this to the others about banks: Don’t be greedy. Don’t overstep, don’t overreach.
Get in, get the money, get out.
Now he had to take his own advice.

The thought of Jem standing behind her at the pizzeria—like a flickering image-echo of the two of them at the Kenmore Square vault, a couple waiting for the elevator—gripped his heart like a fist. It crystallized the danger Doug had invited into her life, as well as his own. Staying away meant keeping Jem away from her and the G away from him. No more daydreams about healing
Claire Keesey, or magically absolving himself. The best thing he could do for her now, the only thing, as well as for himself, was to let her go.

T
HE GLASS PANE RATTLED
in the front door as Doug entered, heading upstairs to Jem’s before realizing the music he heard was pounding in the basement, not on the second floor. He turned and went outside, walking along a weedy stripe of cracked cement to the backyard bulkhead.

The stone cellar was dank, the floor moist and brown, tears of condensation glistening in the corners. The clank of steel on steel—Jem always smacked the weight plates together, he was there to make some noise—died against the damp walls, a discordant counterpoint to the soar and crash of Zep’s “Kashmir.”

Jem was on his back, doing presses on the old, overweighted machine. The cables squealed, the bottom rails rusty and fuzzed with mildew from cellar floodings.

He finished and sat up, fire-faced, the long veins in his forearms like blue snakes feeding under his skin. “Hey,” he said, hopping off the bench, “check it out, I just picked these up.” Three thumping speakers were set on shoulderhigh stands around the machine like cameras on tripods. “Wireless,” he said, moving his hands around one like a magician demonstrating a levitation trick. “Receives from my stereo upstairs. Three bills each, but
damn
.” He cranked the volume to demonstrate, head jerking to the beat atop his thickened neck, for-getting or simply not caring that any metal inside the speakers would be oxidized within a matter of weeks. “Fuckin’
rocks,
man.”

Unlike his speakers, Jem was wired. It was the buzz of lifting and maybe something more. He turned the music back down and boosted a curling bar, balancing two wide, fifty-pound plates and a couple of twenties. “Get changed and come back down, we’ll hit it serious.” He started a set of preacher curls, his face filling with blood.

This was not the welcome Doug had expected. Jem coming off friendly and pretending nothing was wrong was scarier than him taking a sledge to the weeping walls.

“Last night,” said Doug.

“Was that a fucking outrage or what?” said Jem, breaking off his reps, bouncing the bar on the floor. “Motherfuckin’ Wakefield, I hate knuckleballers. Straight-ball pitcher starts to lose his stuff in the sixth, you can see it, his speed, his control. Funny-ball pitchers lose their stuff? It’s like a trapdoor opened. Ball stops moving, and now they’re serving up fucking gopher balls to free-agent millionaires.”

“Who you following, Jem? Me or her?”

Still the poker face. “Told you, kid, I made the Shamrock out on Boylston,
parked outside ’BCN. Which is fucked-up, by the way. Somebody take that primo shit off your hands, leave a thank-you note taped to the meter.”

“You got something to say, say it now.”

Jem smiled past him to the near speaker. “Don’t know, kid,” he said, turning down the tunes. “See—I think that’s
my
line here.”

Doug sniffed, shifted his weight. “Told you I was working on things. Making sure we were clear.”

“Yeah. And maybe it started out that way.” Jem tightened the wrist straps on his lifting gloves. “Then again, you grabbed her license from me pretty fast.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it, yeah? I mean, she’s awright, don’t get me wrong. I had my hand on her ass too, at the vault.” He looked up. “Though I guess you broke that up too, didn’t you.”

“The fuck are you talking about?”

“You tell me you’re workin’ a scam here, I’ll say, ‘Cool.’ ’Cause that’s something I
get
. That’s something makes
sense
to me. But anything else, and I’d say we got us a problem here.”

Doug tried going on the attack. “That was stupid, you coming around like that. A stupid play. What’d you think—you were embarrassing me or something? You could of come to talk to me alone. I was keeping her separate from you guys—but especially you, ass-grabber. She remembers anyone, it’s gonna be the guy who took her for a ride.”

“You always talk about Boozo’s crew and how reckless they were, like maniacs, crazy for action. Then you go off making googly eyes at the one person—the
one
—who could give the G anything on us. Oh, but I’m a fucking moron.” A Jem smile to go along with the Jem shrug. “Hey, thanks for your protection.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And no, I didn’t tell the others yet. Only because it would flip them the fuck out, and they’re skittish enough already. Plus your boyfriend, the Monsignor, he’d be so brokenhearted jealous. Besides—there’s nothing to tell, right?”

“I told you, I got from her what I wanted.”

“Yeah? It any good?”

Doug frowned. “I’m saying, it’s done. Over.”

Jem squinted to see him better. “Hey, guess what? By the way, me and that assistant manager? We went out hankie shopping together last week. Yeah, I didn’t think it was all that important to tell you.”

“If that’s your fucking point, then you made it.”

“I’m a fucking porcupine with points. You worry me, kid. Seeing her on the side, away from us? That’s like a move, brother. Says that to me. Us or her.”

“Bullshit.”

“I don’t see any room for overlap there. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Doug had always been the only one able to handle Jem. When things got tight, he could pull that brother-withholding-love shit on him and Jem would always come around, settle down. Now everything was out of balance. Now Jem was sitting on all the power.

“Awright,” Jem said, flexing out his lumpy arms, nodding. “Then we can get started on this movie caper.”

Too soon, but now Doug couldn’t say no.

Jem read his silence with a jacked, hungry smile. “You made anybody on your tail? I haven’t.”

“Somebody was watching Dez’s house.”

“
Was
. I think we’re ready to put ourselves back in play.”

“Then Dez has to sit this one out.”

“Fine. And actually dandy too.”

“But he still gets his quarter take.”

Jem eyed Doug, taking his measure. The shrug and the smile arrived together. “Fuckin’ whatever. All ends up in the collection box at St. Frank’s anyhow, right? Catholic charity, bring us some luck. So long as this gig comes together
quick
. That means no fucking stalling. And don’t tell me you ain’t been rolling this around your mind, ’cause I won’t believe it. I bet you got a mark already picked out. Hell—you maybe even got a plan floating around in there.”

Maybe Doug did. Maybe this was exactly what he needed right now, something to occupy his mind. Something to bring them all back together, to the way things used to be.

B
RAINTREE IS A SUBURB
south of Boston where the Southeast Expressway out of the city splits in two: west toward the Maine-to-Florida Interstate 95, and east along Route 3, a state highway riding south to the flexed arm of Cape Cod. Braintree’s draw for city kids of the late 1970s and 1980s was the South Shore Plaza, one of the first enclosed shopping malls in the region, a quick bus trip via the MBTA Red Line stop at Quincy Adams. A hobby shop that sold exploding rockets, a B. Dalton that stored overstock
Playboy
s under tables in the back of the store, the tobacconist C. B. Perkins that also sold lighters and knives, Recordtown, and the suburban girls that roamed the mall in packs and pairs—plus a movie theater, a detached two-screen job next to a Howard Johnson, known as the Braintree Cinema.

Across the street from the mall, Forbes Road was a thin thoroughfare curling wide around the castlelike Sheraton Tara Hotel and the South Shore Executive Park. The road came into view of the highway there, tailing off along the bottom of a blasted rock cliff. A narrow, two-lane offshoot named Grandview Road climbed steeply to the summit of the mount where, surrounded by a few acres of blacktop parking, the old Braintree Cinema had reopened in 1993 as a brand-new multiscreen General Cinemas complex known as The Braintree 10.

Across an eight-lane highway gorge was another cliff road, set on the edge of the Blue Hills Reservation, studded with industrial parks and office buildings. From there the big-signed movie theater looked like a temple above a ravine of automobiles.

An isolated mark. Easy highway access. Secluded vantage points.

The second most important part of the job, after the getaway, is target selection. Once you commit to a target, the details that follow shape themselves to the task at hand.

Y
OU PARK WITH THE
other nine-to-fivers in front of the faceless office building next to the movie theater at the top of Grandview. Behind the building is a wood that descends into a residential area across from the shopping plaza, and
there is a neglected fire road there, its entrance blocked by two craggy boulders. This will be your emergency escape route. If everything else goes to hell, you know that you can take to the trees on foot, dump your weapons and strip down to street clothes, and cross to a car parked at the mall before K-9 units and State Police helicopters hunt you down.

Your Bearcat 210 scanner crackles underneath the newspaper, jammed between the two front seats. Field glasses wait in the glove, with the birdwatching guide as their excuse, but you won’t need the nocs today. Your position is too good: a side view of the movie-theater parking lot between low shrubs, the morning crows picking at pretzel bites and Raisinets.

The only two cars in the lot appear empty. A navy blue Cressida putters in after 10 A.M., parking on the side near the trash cage. The manager locks his car, uses his key in the side entrance door under swooping, popcorn-loving seagulls, and you clock it.

Seagulls and crows, that’s all you have until 11:15, when a couple of rattling imports pull in: the weekday crew, mostly older people, part-timers. You clock it.

First showing of any movie that day will be at 12:20. Late-Monday-morning pickup time means no crowd control, no citizen heroes, minimal witnesses.

At 11:29, a white Plymouth Neon rolls in, parking at the wood railing along the front edge of the lot. A guy wearing sneakers and a ponytail gets out, climbs onto the roof of his car, and sits there cross-legged. He opens a sandwich and a yogurt, eating lunch while looking across the highway at the serene Blue Hills.

At 11:32, the can rolls in. You clock it, committing the time to memory but nothing to paper—no evidence in case you get pulled over.

The armored truck rumbles in steady on oversized wheels. You recognize it as a Pinnacle truck. Pinnacle’s colors are blue and green.

The can rolls right up to the front and parks in the fire lane at the stairs to the lobby. Its lone rear door faces you as the truck idles.

Nothing happens for one minute.

The passenger door opens and the courier guard, also known as the messenger or hopper, steps out with the heel of his hand on the butt of his belt-holstered sidearm. He wears an open-collared, police-blue shirt with his identification hanging alligator-clipped to one of the collar points, the Pinnacle patch sewn onto his right shoulder, an oversized silver badge pinned to his breast pocket.