What Maven thought would end quickly and violently turned into a slow-boiling standoff. He checked the street occasionally, watching cars pull up and switch off. Royce had his men working six-hour shifts.
Ricky came out of his room midmorning, dressed to leave. “Okay. I’m going now.”
Maven opened the refrigerator freezer. “I wouldn’t.”
“It’s daylight. They’ll see I’m not you.”
“They won’t care.”
“I’ll go with my hands up.”
“Where is it you need to go so badly?”
Ricky looked at the tipped-back chair beneath the doorknob. “You don’t understand... I need my medicine. I got a lot of pain.”
Maven closed the freezer with a frozen pizza in his hand. Ricky eventually retreated to his room again.
He reemerged twenty minutes later, this time with a coat on. “Look, this is bullshit.” He launched into a prepared speech. “I can’t take being locked in here, I just can’t. This is my place, and I need to go, so I’m going. You hear me? I’m going to go.”
He walked to the door, expecting Maven to stop him. Maven just kept chewing his pizza, his gun on the table next to a napkin.
Ricky stood before the front legs of the tipped-back chair, not getting the reaction he wanted. “If you knew they were following you, why’d you lead them back here? To my home?”
“I needed a gun.”
“So now you’re trapped here. Me too. Brilliant. That’s fucking great.”
Maven said nothing.
Ricky said, “Okay, if they want you so bad, why aren’t they coming in?”
“Because no one wants to be first.”
Ricky gripped the legs and removed the chair from beneath the knob. He opened it to the outside door.
“They will take you, Ricky. They will use you to try to get to me. But I will not bargain, and I will not bend.”
Ricky stood before the second door, his chest rising and falling with anxiety.
Maven took catnaps in the easy chair, resting his eye and taking the edge off his exhaustion. He kept waking from a dream of them coming up the back steps and rushing inside.
Ricky lay on the living room sofa halfheartedly playing Grand Theft Auto to pass the time. He was shot in an attempted carjacking, then threw aside his controller, speckled with beads of sweat. He jumped to his feet and walked twice around the room, disappearing into the bathroom, starting up the shower yet again.
Maven checked the Weather Channel forecast every few hours. He went to the window to check the street.
At the corner bus stop, three men waited inside the transparent plastic kiosk. The bus came and went, and only two of them had boarded.
The heat had been turned off a few hours ago. Ricky hadn’t yet noticed. He kept taking showers because he was sweating through his clothes. Maven was disgusted by how short fentanyl’s leash was on Ricky. When he emerged from the bathroom, Ricky wandered the rooms patting at the skin on his face, smoothing down his wet hair.
Overnight, Ricky was watching The Tyra Banks Show with his arms crossed when the power went out.
Maven reached for his Glock and stepped silently into the kitchen. He watched the door and waited, listening.
He heard footsteps on the roof. He positioned himself in the shadows beneath the ceiling’s only skylight as a shadow appeared on the slanting rectangle of moonlight on the floor. Ricky had fallen back into a fitful sleep on the sofa, where the man on the roof could not see him.
Maven readied the Glock. He watched the man cup his eyes to the glass and peer inside. Seeing nothing, he straightened and went away.
The apartment was quiet for the rest of the night.
Ricky knelt at the toilet bowl, his dry heaves bringing up nothing. The water had been turned off, the interior of the bowl disgusting. Ricky muttering into it, “I gotta get outta here, I gotta get outta here.”
He stumbled into the living room wrapped in a blanket as the lights flickered on again. The wall phone rang almost immediately.
Maven stood but did not approach the phone. The machine answered.
Royce said, “Not man enough to come out? You disappoint me, Maven. But don’t worry. It won’t be long now. Some guys, when they’re cornered like this, they decide to tap out rather than face the end. I know you won’t deprive me like that.”
Royce hung up, and Maven stood still a moment longer before returning to his project, laid out on the floor: a yellow rain slicker covered with duct tape.
“What is that?” said Ricky.
Maven said, “It’s going to rain.”
Ricky turned the TV on, but a few moments later the power went out again.
Maven shook Ricky awake after sundown. Ricky startled at the sight, Maven bulked up in vest armor beneath the tape-dulled slicker. A roar of falling water disoriented Ricky, who looked over and saw that it was pouring rain in his living room.
The easy chair had been set beneath the removed skylight, absorbing the water and most of the sound. The two duffel bags were zipped shut and waiting near the chair, as was a heavy coat for Ricky.
“Pass me up the bags,” said Maven, who sprang from the easy-chair armrest to the lip of the skylight, hauling himself up.
The gun bag was heavy. Ricky pushed it up to Maven’s hand with great effort. Then the money, which was lighter. Then Maven reached down his empty hand.
Ricky shrugged on the coat and let Maven pull him up over the edge, dragging him onto the roof.
The fresh, wet air was a shock. Maven laid the skylight back over the opening, then carried both bags to the edge. He tossed them onto the roof of the neighboring house, a few yards across a three-story drop. Then he went back for Ricky, sitting on the roof near the skylight.
“No way. Not jumping.”
Maven pulled on him. “Get up.”
“No.” Ricky shook him off with more vehemence than Maven thought possible, whacking his arm away. “Leave me here.”
“Come on.”
He reached for Ricky again, and Ricky went at him with his fists. “Leave me!” he yelled. “Just leave me, like you did before. You don’t care. Just go.” Ricky sat in the rain as if he were never going to move again. “You were my only friend.”
Maven stared at him a moment, feeling Ricky’s words, weigh ing his options — then he knelt and took Ricky’s wrist, getting him up and pulling him across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Ricky did not fight him. Maven hauled him in that way to the edge of the roof, then paced back from it to measure out a running start.
The leap was ugly, but they made it, falling hard onto the lower roof.
Maven carried the bags, and Ricky followed, down the rear stairs past interior lights coming on. They reached the ground and went around the far side of the next house, up to the corner nearest the street.
A bus came along, moving right to left. Maven slung the money bag over his shoulder, grasping Ricky’s coat with his free hand, and as the bus passed, he ran them across the street behind it, obscured by its bulk and bright headlights.
Maven ducked and went from parked car to parked car along the sidewalk until he was two away from the only idling vehicle. The driver’s head was tipped back.
The dealer known as Hex jerked awake at the knock on the window, opening the door in an obedient daze. Maven went in hard, releasing the seat back and dragging Hex into the rear seat. Ricky dropped into the driver’s seat, and Maven, beating on Hex, told Ricky to drive to the beach.
The tide was in, the water moving with the slow lubricity of freezer-chilled vodka. Maven dragged Hex onto the sand. He held Hex’s phone and pistol.
“Where is Royce?” said Maven.
Hex wiped his bloody nose. One eye was swollen shut and he was missing a shoe. “Go to hell you mother—”