The Town: A Novel (61 page)

“What hotel?” said Frawley. “I didn’t find out anything until an hour beforehand.”

MacRay looked hard at Claire again. Something was going on there.

Frawley said, “We’re talking about Coughlin’s sister, right?”

MacRay’s eyes came back to Frawley, so still and staring that Frawley thought MacRay was gone. Then MacRay nodded. He seemed to relax.

Frawley’s heart was pumping hard enough for both of them. “You got the Florist.”

MacRay blinked. “Tell Dez I did it for him. For the Town.”

Frawley wanted to feel nothing for the crook, but to be in a room with a dying man is to die a little yourself. “You’ll have to tell him.”

The only reaction was a flicker in MacRay’s eyes.

“The money.” said Frawley. “Where’s the rest of your stash?”

MacRay was falling into himself.

“Where’s the money?” pressed Frawley.

Claire said, “Leave him alone.”

MacRay was going. Frawley backed away, heavy-legged. He picked up the phone and dialed 911.

S
HE CAME FORWARD AND
took his empty hand, holding it tenderly in her own, as though the hand itself was the thing that was dying.

Doug said, “You were never going away. With me. Were you.”

She held his gaze. Her wet-eyed expression said no.

He felt love streaming out of his hand into hers like electricity.

She would find it in the spring. The money he had buried like doomed hope in her garden. Like a note he’d left for her. Maybe she could use it to fund her work at the Boys and Girls Club. Maybe in time she’d think of him differently.

His left hand fell away from his neck as he focused on her face. He wanted her to be the last earthly thing he would see.

Even if a thing is doomed—there is that moment of absurd hope that is worth the fall, that is worth everything.

C
LAIRE FELT THE SHOCK
of lifelessness in his limp hand. She dropped it out of fright and would only later wilt at the shame of letting him go. Right now a dead man was lying on her floor and her mind was choking on this.

Why had he come to her to die? Dragging himself into her kitchen, just as he had dragged himself into her life. She despised him for the mess he had made, the blood on her floor like the stain on her soul. And yet. And yet as she looked at him now, she could not help but feel for the motherless boy inside. For Adam Frawley too, the vengeful one whispering into the telephone—these two lovesick sons she had gotten caught between. But for the men they had become, she had only scorn.

She recalled a news story about a woman who was accidentally knocked overboard a moored cruise ship. She came up to the surface unhurt, treading water, but trapped by the tide pushing the massive ship back against the dock. She would have been crushed to death if she hadn’t wriggled out of her evening dress and kicked off her heels, swimming straight down into the blackness, feeling her way blindly along the hull to the deep bottom keel, then pulling herself past it and kicking free, lungs bursting as she surfaced on the other side, naked and alive.

Had Claire made it to the other side? Was she coming up for air now?

The police were already in her foyer, and she reached for Doug’s hand one last time before they were separated forever. His body had settled against the chair, his hand impossibly heavy now and wanting to fall. She noticed dirt under his fingernails and darkening his cuticles, and thought immediately of her garden. She couldn’t imagine any reason why he would have gone there—nor why she felt so certain that he had.

Walk to the water until you can feel it on your toes. Then take off the blindfold.

She felt the same sensation of passing as she had watching her young brother die: of something coming to nothing, yes, but at the same time, a conferring of responsibility, a covenant passed from the dead to the living.

Claire was taking off the blindfold now. She looked deep into Doug’s dimming eyes, reminded of hearth fires and how, even after the flames died, the
glowing cinders were slow to cool. She wondered what it was that Doug MacRay saw as the glow of his life faded. She wondered what died last in the heart of a thief.

“C
AN’T DO IT,” SAID
Jem. “I can’t fucking do it. He’s turning my fucking stomach with this. We ordered these sandwiches what, twelve hours ago? You couldn’t get cold cuts like the rest of us, Magloan? Sitting here with your soggy-ass steak sub, these fucking limp peppers.”

Dez said, “Never mind that he’s been eating the thing for like, three hours.”

“This isn’t eating anymore,” said Jem, “this is lovemaking. He’s getting it on with a steak sub. Somebody cover my young, impressionable eyes.”

Dez said, “Joanie does usually go around with a smile on her face.”

“Oh—no question Gloansy gives primo head,” Jem said. “I can vouch for that.”

Doug shushed their groaning laughter, not very concerned about the audio sensors inside the vault’s antitamper package, but careful just the same. The four of them sitting on the floor behind the teller counter in dusty blue jumpsuits, the bank brightening with morning light, trucks and cars rumbling outside through Kenmore Square.

“Know what we need?” said Gloansy, still munching. “Those headsets with ear wires, like in the movies. So we can talk while we’re in different rooms.”

“Headsets are gay,” said Jem. “You’d look like a girl folding pants at the Gap. Walkie-talkies—that’s a man’s radio.”

“I’m talking hands-free,” said Gloansy. “Gun in one hand, bag of cash in the other, capeesh?”

“Do not say
capeesh.
You sound like a douche.” Jem got to his feet, stretched. “See, this is too fucking relaxed here. This isn’t robbing. This, we could do back at my place. Why going in on the prowl sucks. All night, cutting a hole in the fucking ceiling. Like
working
for a living.”

“Prowl is smart,” said Doug.

“Prowl is pussy,” said Jem.

Doug checked the wall clock. “You want strong, kid, we go strong in about ten minutes. Let’s pack this shit up.”

Gloansy said, “But I haven’t finished my snack.”

Jem snatched it out of his hands and mashed it, threw it into their trash bag. “You finished now? ’Cause I got a fucking bank to rob.”

Doug checked his Colt’s load and dropped it back into his pocket, knowing he was much more likely to hit someone over the head with the thing than he ever was to fire it. As obsessive as Doug was about the jobs they pulled, Jem’s weapons source was the one detail he preferred to know nothing about. If indeed it was the Florist or one of the dust-brained kids in the Florist’s employ, that would only piss Doug off.

Gloansy got to his feet without his Mountain Dew. Doug told him, “You gonna leave your tonic there, you might as well write your name and Social Security number on the wall in blood.”

“I got it, I got it,” said the freckled wonder, stowing it in the open work duffel near the bleach jugs.

They went on with their bickering for a few more precious preheist minutes, and Doug took a step back and realized that this was the part of the job he liked best. The intervals of downtime when they were all just kids again, four messed-up boys from the Town, so good at being so bad. He realized he never felt more secure, more at peace, more protected, than he did then, cooping inside a bank they were about to rob. Nobody could touch them there. Nobody could hurt them except each other.

Jem said, “Bad news, Monsignor.
Rolling Stone
said U2’s next album is disco.”

Dez rubbed at his eyes, prodding his contact lenses. “Not true.”

“It happens, kid. These things can’t last forever. Got to end sometime.”

“We’ll see,” said Dez, wiring his police radio into his ear. “We shall see.”

Jem pulled a paper Foodmaster bag out of the work duffel. “Game faces,” he said, handing out black ski masks.

“This is it?” said Gloansy, pulling on the knit mask. “This what you been so top-secret about?”

Jem grinned his grin and went back into the bag. “Feast your eyes, ladies.”

Doug received his goalie mask and looked it over—the oval eyes, the jagged, black, hand-drawn stitches.

“Gerry Cheevers,” said Gloansy, awestruck, pulling it on over his ski mask.

Jem pulled a gun into his blue-gloved hand and said, “Let’s make some motherfucking
bank
.”

The other masks nodded, smacked fists all around, Doug looking at the stitched-up faces of his friends. Dez went to take his position inside the shaded front windows, Gloansy remaining behind the counter.

Doug turned past the vault, following Jem down the short hallway to the back door where they faced each other in the shadows, standing silent and still on either side. Doug had no dark premonitions about the job as he pulled the black .38 into his hand. The only thing bothering him now was that the fun
part was already over.

A car pulled up outside, doors opening, shutting. “Fucking clockwork,” hissed Jem’s empty-eyed mask.

Claire Keesey. That was the branch manager’s name. She drove a plum Saturn coupe with a useless rear spoiler and a bumper sticker that said B
REATHE
! She was single, as far as Doug could tell, and he wondered why. Surprising, the things you could learn about a person from a distance, the impressions that you formed. Tailing her for so long, watching her from afar, had raised more questions than answers. He was curious about her now. He wondered, with the idle affection of a guy thinking about a girl, what she was going to look like up close.

Debts owed to: Charlotte, for unwavering support; my father, source of strength and inspiration; my Melanie and my Declan; the uncanny NewGents; Richard Abate, Prince of Agents; Colin Harrison, who enriched this book in record time; Kevin Smith at Pocket; Sarah Knight and everybody at Scribner; and Nan Graham and Susan Moldow.

Scribner proudly presents

Devils in Exile

By

Chuck Hogan

Now available from Scribner

Turn the page for an excerpt from
Devils in Exile…

A
COLD
S
ATURDAY NIGHT IN
November.

Neal Maven stood on the edge of the parking lot, looking up at the buildings of downtown Boston. He was wondering about the lights left shining in the windows of the top-floor offices—who does that, and why—when a thumping bass line made him turn.

A silver limousine eased around the corner. Its long side windows were mirrored so that the less fortunate could see themselves watching the American dream pass them by. Maven stuffed his hands deep inside the pouch pockets of his blanket-thick hoodie, stamping his boots on the blacktop to keep warm.

Nine months now. Nine months he’d been back. Nine months since demobilization and discharge, like nine months of gestation, waiting to be reborn back into the peacetime world. Nine months of transition and nothing going right.

He had already pissed through most of his duty pay. The things you tell the other guys you’re going to do once you get back home—grow a beard, drink all night, sleep all day—those things he had done. Those goals he had achieved. The things the army recommends doing before discharge, to ease your transition—preparing a résumé, lining up housing, securing employment—those things he had let slide.

A lot of businesses still stuck yellow support our troops ribbons in their front windows, but when you actually showed up fresh from Iraq, looking for work, scratching your name and address on an application pad, they saw not a battle-tested hero but a potential Travis Bickle. Hiring a guy with more confirmed kills than college credits was a tough sell. Maven could feel civilians’ discomfort around him, their unease. As if they heard a
tick, tick, tick
going inside his head. Probably the same one he heard.

Barroom conversations took on subtext.