“I always said it,” said Royce. “Always, I said — this one, he’s different.”
“Told you he was trouble,” said Termino. “I want to know where the fuck he’s been all this time.”
Royce said, “His eye. The Jamaican. Lockerty’s still out there. And evidently still pissed.”
Maven burned, staring at Royce on the computer.
Royce said, “See, Maven, if you were dead now, as you’re supposed to be... well, then, there’d be no hard feelings.”
Maven said, “Suarez. Glade.”
“You were done with those guys, especially Glade. Look, if I could have kept anybody on, it would have been you. But you wouldn’t go for it. You told me as much.”
Maven said, “Samara.”
“The girlfriend. Maybe you talk in your sleep, how do I know? She’d been up to the pad. She could make Termino and myself. She knew things, Maven. I’m not a guy who leaves things to chance.”
“You didn’t have to do it.”
“And you didn’t have to bring her around.”
Somebody grabbed Maven’s arms behind him.
Royce said, “So I am going to watch this now and make sure it’s done right this time, and when it’s over, one of us is gonna be dead, and the other one’s gonna feel a lot better.”
Maven struggled against the goon holding his arms, but he lacked both strength and leverage. A strip of duct tape was ripped off a fat roll, binding Maven’s wrists behind him.
A goon brought over a wooden stool, and Termino set the computer on top of it so that Royce could watch. Another handed Termino a clear plastic bag.
Termino shook it open. He said, “Less mess this way.”
He thrust the bag over Maven’s head. Another screech of tape, and Termino sealed the bag around Maven’s neck.
Maven shook his head as though he could throw off the bag. He tried holding his breath, but quickly realized that was a losing strategy.
Maven opened his mouth and inhaled deeply, sucking some of the bag into his lips. He caught the plastic with his tongue and began chewing it.
Termino smiled. Maven heard him say, his voice muffled through the sealed bag, “This guy won’t ever just lie down.”
Gunfire ripped the air then. Maven thought he was being executed and fell forward, twisting and landing on his side. The goons around him scattered, the bald one firing his MAC-10 full auto, the suppressor making a sound like chattering teeth.
Someone else was here. Rounds zipped overhead, and Maven’s head screamed panic and pain, his lungs bursting as he chewed on the bag in his mouth.
He tasted a thin sip of cool air. His tongue found the hole and worked to make it bigger, Maven rolling onto his back and sliding across the glazed floor to the nearest counter. Through the clear plastic, he saw low shelves cluttered with supplies. He kicked at them with his boots, spilling the contents to the floor. Elastic bands and packets of flower food and blank note cards — and scissors.
Termino was at the exit when he saw his guy Kelvin coming up behind him.
“What happened?” said Kelvin, an Irishman with a tribal tattoo up the side of his neck to the back of his shaved head.
Termino pushed him back toward the shooting. “Find Maven. Shoot him in the fucking head. Make sure.”
Kelvin nodded and started back as Termino went out the exit.
Maven sliced the tape off his wrists. Before he could rip off his plastic hood, he saw a shadow on the floor.
He stood and vaulted off the counter, the tattoo making for a nice target as he buried one blade of the scissors in the base of the goon’s bald skull. He locked up the guy’s gun arm, the shooter squeezing off chattering MAC-10 rounds until Maven wrested it from his grip.
The goon fell, and Maven took cover behind a cluster of potted trees. He was ripping the plastic off his face when he saw the notebook computer on the floor, knocked onto its side.
“Maven,” Royce said, staring out of the screen in utter disbelief.
Maven opened up the MAC on Royce’s image, blasting the computer across the floor.
Maven stumbled outside, hoping to find the Highlander, but the vehicle was gone.
Sporadic gunfire continued inside as Maven hurried away, turning toward a weeded lot, dumping the gun once he was safely underneath the expressway.
The Papa Gino’s men’s room was a single bathroom with a door that locked. Maven first washed the bald goon’s blood off his hands, then stared at his bandaged face in the mirror. His own image drifted in the vision of his one good eye.
He started with his clothes, removing his shirt and pants, checking socks and underwear, running every inch of fabric between his fingers. Someone knocked, and Maven froze as though he had been followed. But when he said, “Go away!” — they did.
He viewed his surgical scars in the mirror, tracing the stitch marks over his side and arm, the hem of his flesh raised and rugged. Butcher work. Had they sewn something in there, under his skin?
He resumed checking his clothes, then his boots. He noticed a fine slice along the rubber side of his heel and went after it, banging the tread on the edge of the sink until the heel piece dislodged and a battery-size gizmo fell out.
A tracking device.
That was why Lockerty had let him go. So that Maven could lead him to Royce. Only — Lockerty’s hired hands had jumped too soon.
He dropped the device into the toilet and hit the handle, watching it circle the drain before being sucked away.
Maven returned to the mirror: naked, dope sick, half-blind — but truly free. He felt the tape along the edges of the dirtied bandage, then slowly, and with great pain, began peeling it back from his face.
Going Back
He was outside the Bank of America at Boylston and Exeter when it opened Monday morning. He had no key or identification and so asked for the manager who had assisted him on his previous visits.
“Oh,” said the woman, stout with a pincushion face, lowering her voice. “Are you a friend of his?”
Maven caught the word no before it left his lips. “I am.”
“He... he won’t be coming back. For health reasons.”
She widened her eyes to stress the word health, and Maven knew she meant drugs. He answered questions based on his original safe-deposit-box application — the one Royce had taken him to — and passed a handwriting comparison. He was then led to the vault and his box door was unlocked and brought to the examining table. They left him alone and he opened the long lid, and it was exactly as he had feared.
Wiped out. As empty as his eye socket. He sat holding his throbbing head in his hands.
The Marlborough Street building was locked up, Roof Deck Properties and Management abandoned. Even the carriage-house garage was padlocked.
Maven was hungry and cold. He tried the Veterans Administration building on Causeway Street, but could not get past the front desk — again, lacking any form of identification. An administrator took pity on him however, offering him a flannel jacket with a ripped quilted lining out of the donation bin. She gave him a clinic pass, and the doctor cleaned out his orbit, redressed the wound, and gave him something for the pain.
Outside the clinic, Maven was throwing the sample pills in the trash when he saw a vet working cars at a traffic light. The guy’s cardboard sign said that he was disabled and hungry. Maven reacted more to the patrol cap on his head.
Maven started walking. He did 8.2 miles on his broken bootheel — the same route he used to run after his parking-lot shift — arriving in Quincy just before dark.
The pea green Parisienne left little space for the other tenants’ beaters in the cracked driveway. Maven climbed the rear steps to the top-floor entrance of the triple-decker. He thumped on the curtain-covered glass with a cold hand and waited while a light came on inside.