“Okay!” said the guy with the knife at his throat.
Maven entered the shadow of the trees fronting the small house on a quiet Forest Hills side street. He waited out a bout of dizziness, then looked inside the window, seeing the back of a sofa in a darkened room.
He opened up the holder’s phone and selected the dealer’s digits from the list. He thumbed him a text message that read, 5–0 coming — ditch phones and split.
Then he waited.
The room brightened and footsteps clumped around inside. Maven heard jingling keys, then the front door opened and sneaker soles tapped flagstones. The Jeep next to Maven chirped, the locks disengaging, the dealer rounding the corner with a backpack on his shoulder, wearing two sweatshirts under a coat.
When he opened the driver’s door, Maven ran at him from behind, shoving him across the driver’s seat into the passenger side, the dealer’s head striking the door.
Maven ran his hands up inside the guy’s sweatshirts, finding a pistol. The dealer squealed, trapped and unable to see, thinking this was it.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t do me like this.”
Maven grabbed the keys out of his hand and closed the door, saying, “Cut the meek act, sit up.”
He did. The multiple layers bulked him out, but the dealer had good size to begin with. He was surprisingly clean-cut. He looked at Maven and the pistol and said, “You’re fucking crazy.”
“You shitbags keep telling me that.” Maven stuck the key in the ignition, starting up the Jeep. Then he unzipped the backpack.
Phones, another handgun, and cash below.
Lots of cash.
Maven stuck the backpack under his legs, on the floor against his calves. “I want to see Royce.”
The dealer stared, hiding his trembling under a constant nodding. “And?”
“You telling me you don’t know the name?”
“I know the president’s name too. Doesn’t mean I met the man.”
Maven threw the Jeep in reverse and banged out over the curb, riding fast down the street. “What other names you know?”
Ricky woke up dehydrated, having sweated through his clothes. He changed into boxers and stumbled out to the fridge for some Mountain Dew and found Maven sitting at the kitchen table.
Instead of food in front of him, there were two guns, two ejected clips, a handful of phones, two knives, seven or eight thick bundles of cash, and a folded white take-out bag scribbled all over with a checklist of names and addresses.
Maven, all dark energy, looked up at Ricky. “I’m gonna be here a couple of days, maybe a week. Maybe longer.”
Kool
Lash showed up late at the shoot house in Mattapan. This one was full service. You go in through the front door and choose door A or door B. Door B was unlocked and led to a warren of rooms inside, each one worse than the next. That was the shooting gallery, where you shot, snorted, or smoked whatever you bought through the pay hole in door A. That door had been reinforced with a cage soldered into a steel frame, two hinged slots cut into the backing wood, one at eye level, the other at hand level.
Door A was open and warped now and wouldn’t close. A table inside had been knocked over, a bag of Doritos spilled on the floor, along with Baggies and cellophane and powder. All this amid a drying pool of urine.
DEA agent Novack was inside waiting for him. “Still here, huh?”
Lash nodded. “Still got me bouncing.”
“How long?”
“Any day now.”
Novack said, “Hope you like tortillas.”
Lash nodded. Mexico was the current hotspot. Also Afghanistan. The War on Terror had rejuvenated the Golden Crescent — Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran — now producing 90 percent of the world’s opium.
Lash said, “The issue is — do I want to go back overseas, leave my boy? Or maybe it’s time to just walk away?”
Novack was surprised. “I can’t remember life without the shield.”
“You and me both, brother.”
Paramedics were attending to the only guy left inside, bleeding lazily from a gunshot to the thigh. Whiskers jutted out from his parched brown skin, too tired to grow anymore. He smoked a Kool.
The guy was already under arrest. He was more offended than anything. “You gotta get this freak, barging into my house.”
“Your house?” Lash said.
The guy shrugged. Another abandoned property colonized by zombies. A neighbor had buttonholed Lash on his way in. “People going in and out all night and day.”
Lash told her, “Why you neighbors always wait until the police show up to drop a dime?”
He looked at the blood being photographed on the floor. “Anyone shoot back at him?”
“No chance, no time,” said the Kool smoker. “Dude efficient.”
“You get a good look?”
“White-ass mutherfucka. Came in, did a buy first. Feeling it out. People don’t respect nothing no more, not a locked door, nothing.”
“I need more than skin color.”
“Wore an eye patch. Silly-ass pirate disguise. And an army-type cap. Camouflage on it. Dude was circumcised.”
Lash said, “Come again?”
“Whipped out his dick and pissed on my stash. You gotta get this freak.”
“He took money, but not product?”
The Kool guy pointed to the mess on the floor.
Lash said, “You said an army cap?”
Ladder
Maven crouched behind a burlap-wrapped shrub, waiting for a buyer to pull up. He closed his eye when he could, resting it, easing the strain. He was still getting used to the eye patch he had purchased at CVS.
A blue Camaro arrived, and Maven grabbed the guy on the front steps, hair-walking him up to the door, ringing the bell. The homeowner tried to slam it shut when he saw Maven behind the buyer, so Maven used the buyer’s head as a battering ram.
Inside, he held a Glock 19 to the head of the homeowner as the guy worked the combination on a closet safe. He dumped the cash and two guns into Maven’s backpack and pulled out two cellophane-wrapped half-kilo bricks of cocaine.
Maven asked him where the rest was.
The homeowner said there was no more. Maven hit him in the face.
The homeowner showed him a brownie pan in the kitchen refrigerator containing a full kilo wrapped in wax paper.
Maven sat both men at the table where he could see them. He found a roll of aluminum foil and wrapped it around the cocaine, then placed the shiny bundle into the range-top microwave and punched in five minutes on HIGH.
A bout of dizziness made him reach for the counter. He sensed them growing bold, and turned fast, the room listing a bit in his vision. “Where is Royce?”
The homeowner shook his head, staring at his microwave. “I don’t know.”
Maven pressed START. The foil started to crackle and spark.
“Where’s Royce?”
“I don’t know!”
The rotating package glowed, then burst into bright silver flame. White smoke leaked out of the edges of the door.
“Royce!” said Maven.
“I don’t — nobody knows!”
The microwave popped as though bursting, the smoke turning an ominous gray. The homeowner started to get to his feet, but Maven gun-pointed him back into his chair. He couldn’t get anything out of him about Royce and had to settle for information on the homeowner’s supplier — the next highest rung on this interminable ladder.
The smoke detector went shrieking as the microwave door melted and the oven burst into flames, the fire going into the wall. Maven found a kitchen telephone and dialed 911. He said, to the dispatcher who answered, “I am a drug dealer and my house is on fire.” Then he tossed the telephone into the owner’s lap and walked out.