The Town: A Novel (6 page)

“Uh-oh,” said Dino, coming up closer to Frawley. “That look in his eyes.”

Frawley shook his head, watching daughter and father walk past the front windows and away. “I was ready to write her off completely, except…”

“C’mon. I can take it.”

“Except that she moved about a year ago. The address we had is out-of-date.”

“So she has a new address. And?”

Frawley turned back, watching the wise smile dawn on Dino’s seen-it-all face.

“Nah,” Dino said, playing at disbelief. “Can’t be.”

Frawley nodded. “Charlestown.”

D
OUG CARRIED A HAM
and cheese sub from the Foodmaster out across Austin Street and up Old Rutherford Avenue to the O’Neil Memorial Ice Skating Rink.

“Hey, hon,” said the oaken woman smoking behind the rentals counter, and Doug waved hello with a genial smile that belied his down mood. Nailed to the wall behind her was a yellowed newspaper photo of Doug in his Charlestown High hockey uniform, which he took care to ignore.

The rink inside was only half-lit, Boston Bruins and Charlestown Youth Hockey rafter flags hanging high over the day-care kids leaning on milk crates and chop-stepping their way around the overweight instructor in a slow parade. Two teachers stood outside the boards, sloppy, elephant-legged neighborhood girls in long shirts and stretch pants who checked out Doug as he passed them for the skate-scored bleachers.

Jem and Gloansy were halfway up the risers where the bleachers ended at center ice, splitting a sausage-and-burger pizza and drinking out of paper-bagged bottles of beer the shape of artillery shells.

“What are you two pedophiles up to?” said Doug, rapping their fists and sitting one row above them.

Freddy “Gloansy” Magloan of the Mead Street Magloans wore the same splotchy freckles that were the birthright of his seven brothers and sisters. His face was jaw-heavy, jocular and dumb, his ears so mottled they were tan. His pale hands were tarnished with the same sun rust.

Jimmy “Jem” Coughlin of the Pearl Street Coughlins was all shoulders and arms, his head a small squash under swept-back hair that was thick and old-penny brown. The pronounced ridge beneath his nose didn’t help, and then there were those blue-white snowflake eyes. The Jem machine operated at two speeds: Mirth or Menace. The gang of knuckles around his emerald-studded gold Claddagh ring were still purple and swollen from his tune-up of the assistant manager.

“Here’s the criminal mastermind now,” said Jem. “Where’s the Monsignor?”

“Coming,” said Doug, setting his bag down over some ancient racist knifescratchings.

“Cheryl, man,” said Gloansy, crooking his head at the teacher with the dark, frizzy hair squeezed off in a leopard-print scrunchy. “Ever I see her, I think of third-grade class picture—Duggy, right? Front row and center.
Little House on the Prairie
dress with ruffles, pink plastic shoes. Hands folded, legs crossed tight at the ankles.”

“Last time that happened,” chewed Jem.

Doug remembered one day in fourth grade, coming out of school to find Cheryl waiting. To kiss him, she said, which she did—before shoving him backward off a curb and running home laughing, leaving him scratching his head about girls for the next few years. Home for her, then as now, was the town-within-a-town of the Bunker Hill Projects, a brick maze of boxy welfare apartments whose architects had taken the word
bunker
to heart. A couple of years ago her younger brother, known around Town as Dingo, got dusted and leaped off the Mystic River Bridge, catching a good shore breeze and only missing his mother’s gravel roof by two buildings. One of the black kids tripping over the ice out there now was Cheryl’s.

“Think about her mouth and where it’s been,” said Jem.

“Don’t,” said Gloansy, his own mouth full.

“That girl could give a plastic soup spoon gonorrhea.”

Gloansy said, garbled, “Let me swallow first, for fuck’s sake.”

“You know she had to take a Breathalyzer once, came back blue-line pregnant?” Jem took a mouthful of beer and gargled it. “Think of Gloansy’s shower drain trap, all gooey and hairy—that’s Cheryl’s tonsils.”

“For Christ!” protested Gloansy, choking down his food.

Desmond Elden entered the rink, muscled though not to the extent of Jem or Doug, but with an added bookishness, thanks to his thick-rimmed Buddy Holly eyeglasses. He wore lineman’s boots, fading jeans, and a denim work shirt with the Nynex logo over the pocket, his fair hair matted down from wearing a phone company helmet all morning.

Dez gave Cheryl and her posse the courtesy of a
Howzitgoin’
before mounting the bleachers, his insulated lunch sack in hand.

Jem said, “I should dock you just for being polite.”

Dez sat down one riser below them. “What, you didn’t even say hello?”

“Fuckin’ softie,” said Jem. “Anything with chicks.”

Doug said, “Where’d you put the truck?”

“Foodmaster parking lot. Cruiser there, so I walked the long way around, just in case.” Dez unzipped the nylon bag between his knees and pulled out a thick sandwich wrapped in wax paper, smiling. “Ma made meat loaf last night,”
he said, then bit in big. “Gotta snap to. I’m due in Belmont in like forty minutes, install a ISDN line.”

Jem took a long pull on his beer and pointed at Dez. “That’s why I hadda swear off work. Too many commitments.”

Gloansy toasted that. “Amen, brother.”

Doug cracked open his Mountain Dew. “So let’s do this.”

Jem ripped a burp and none of the kids on the ice even turned their heads. Doug liked the rink for its awful acoustics. He was worried more and more about surveillance around Town, but no bug could outwit those rumbling refrigerators.

“Not much to say,” said Jem. “Looks like we’re out clean. Newspapers got everything wrong, as usual. Nothing went sour until the end, when everything did.”

Gloansy said, “Duggy, man, you said banks train their people not to hit any alarms until after.”

“They do. It’s a safety issue. Plus banks carry kidnap and extortion insurance, and shit like that voids it.”

Jem shrugged. “So the homo pissed himself. Thing is, it shouldn’t of happened. Could of been real fucking bad. Time to settle up now, and these things get counted. Gloansy, my friend, it’s time to pay the piper. You’re docked.”

Gloansy’s face fell, his open mouth full, looking at Jem. “What the fuck?”

“It was your watch. You knew Monsignor Dez had to leave the vault and teller bells hardwired.”

“
I’m
getting fucking docked?
Me?
”

“All you had to do. Keep the citizens down on the floor and away from the bells.”

“Fuck you.” Gloansy was teary, he was so shocked. “Fuck you, all I had to do? Who boosted the work van? You think you fuckin’… think you
walked
to and from this job? And who torched the rides after the delayed switch?”

“Who was watching that kid at the ATM instead of the bankers at his feet?”

“Fuckin’… so who delayed the switch? You’re the one that brought the manager along. Why’n’t you dock yourself?”

“Plan to. Same as you. A hundred-dollar whack to the each of us.”

“A hundred—” Gloansy’s face relaxed, pulling back into a fuck-you frown. He punched Jem’s left triceps hard, saying, “Fuckin’ ass munch.”

Jem smiled tongue-out and slapped Gloansy’s cheek. “Fuckin’
this
close to bawling, Shirley Temple.”

“Fuck you,” said Gloansy, shaking it off, all better now, taco-ing another sloppy slice into his freckled mouth.

Doug took a bite out of his sandwich, so fucking tired of the whole fucking thing.

“So, the magic number,” said Jem, tearing open packets of salt over the closed pizza box. “This is per, now, and net expenses.” With his finger he traced out a five-digit sum: 76750.

Gloansy worked on the upside-down figure until his eyes grew big.

Dez nodded, a smile flickering before he checked on Doug.

Doug finished chewing, then leaned down and blew the salt figure away.

Jem went on, “That’s minus a chunk I dropped into the kitty for the next one, replace the tools I dumped. And some short bundles of new consecutives, I incinerated, not worth worrying over. And then ten percent off the top for the Florist. Overall, a fucking dynamite haul. Oh—yeah.” He reached into his back pocket. “From the ATM. Stamps for all.”

Doug said, “What’s this with the Florist?”

Jem passed out the stamp sheets. “His tribute.”

“And why you involving him?”

“It’s not like he doesn’t already know about it. It’s the right thing to do.”

“How’d he know?” Doug let his sandwich drop back onto the wrapper on the bench. “I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell anybody. Unless someone here told someone, he didn’t know.”

“Duggy. People know. People in the Town.”

“Tell me how they know.”

“They just know.”

“What do they know? What? Yeah, maybe they
think
they know something. But
thinking
you know something, and actually
knowing
something—that’s two different things. The cops and the G, maybe they
think
they know something. But not
knowing
it is exactly what keeps us on the street, keeps us in the game.”

“Fergie knows a lot of secrets, Duggy.”

“And now he’s got one more on us. I don’t see the point of putting it out there.”

“We don’t duke him, there could be trouble down the road.”

“How?” Doug felt himself getting carried away and not caring. “Trouble how? What trouble, explain that to me. This ‘Code of Silence’ trial now, everybody in town is an opera star. Clutching their hankies and belting it out for the cops and the papers. The fat lady, she’s singing. Just tell me you didn’t visit him in his shop.”

“I saw him out on the pier. He’s my mother’s cousin, Duggy.”

“We’re not Italian, Jem. Third or fourth cousin means maybe a nice Christmas card, not ‘Here’s my kidney, you should need one.’ The G is all over his shop, that is guaran-fucking-teed.”

“It’s so. But you think
he
don’t know that?”

Dez piped up, “That thirty-five grand or so you gave him—he gonna wash that clean before sending it out to the IRA?”

Jem scoffed and said, “All that’s rumor. That’s just for street cred.”

Doug said, “Dez
thinks
he knows that Fergie fronts for the IRA. He doesn’t
know
it—not like he
knows
that Fergie puts dust out on the street, not to mention has a taste for it himself. This is a sixty-year-old man on angel dust you’re meeting out there on the pier, Jem kid. Chatting with, handing bank money to.”

“Look, Fergie’s always putting things into motion. You’re working on our next, sure, but he said, and in not so many words, that he’s got some big things that would suit us nice. That we could buy from him.”

Doug thought he was going to levitate out of his seat. “Why the fuck would we want to work for someone else?
One
good reason.”

“These are marquee scores.”

“Marquee scores!”
Doug waved at the vanished salt. “You got kids in braces or something, that’s not enough? We got more than we can conveniently wash as it is. Marquee scores mean marquee busts, Jem boy. Fergie’s got room on his roster exactly because Boozo’s crew got lazy up in New Hampshire and Boozo’s tweak-freak son, Jackie the Jackal, shot up that armored guard. And the heat from that is
still
out all over the Town. Jackie’s what, he’s our age? Younger? And he’s gonna die in prison. He’d fucking die there anyway, for being stupid and running his mouth, but eighty years is not something he’s gonna survive. And that’s without a murder charge ever being brought—that’s the racketeering thing, interstate, plus the firearms mandatories. This isn’t kid stuff anymore. We all of us, except the Monsignor, got strikes against us. We take a fall now, with twenty-year gun mandies, we’re never gonna land. Got it? I gotta spell this out in salt for you?”

Gloansy said, “I ain’t taking no more falls.”

Doug said, “And I ain’t taking any falls before you. The only thing the law likes less than pro outlaws are reckless outlaws. The G—they don’t like it when you rob banks, that’s fine, fair. Honest heat is honest heat. Toss in kidnapping and assault, their fucking palms start getting sweaty. They take that personal. Suddenly they got jobs on the line—reassignment, whatever. They need results. And we can’t win going up against them nose-to-nose. This crazy Cagney shit you pull, it draws them out. Things go wrong on every job. Trick is, keep moving, don’t fix one fucking mistake with another.”

In the silence that followed, Doug realized he had gone on what was for him a tirade. He was the only one who could talk to Jem like this, and even he was pushing it. Gloansy, or especially Dez, they would have been on the floor with Jem’s knee in their throat.

Jem was making a show of fishing food out of his teeth with his tongue. Doug had been sitting on this stuff too long. He didn’t even know specifically why he was so pissy himself. It was the jokes, it was the beer on their breath and
the hour of the day. It was all of their youth going round and round in circles on the ice down there.