Danielle again. “When do I get to know what the hell this is about? You said you were from the Drug Enforcement Agency?”
“Administration.”
“What?”
“It’s the Drug Enforcement Administration. Common mistake.”
“Okay. What does anything have to do with me?”
“That’s what I’m here about.”
“Nothing, is what this has to do with me. I stay far away from that shit. Would a piss test get you off my back?”
“Probably not.”
“Okay...”
“I don’t waste my time with end users. That’s like picking crumbs out of the carpet. They got vacuum cleaners for that shit. I’m about where these crumbs break off from. The big cookie, shall we say.”
Maven shook his head. “No idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
Lash smiled, having trouble reading Maven. “See, there’s this gang of thieves going around, ripping off players. High-level players. Six-figure deals, not street-corner shakedown. They hit the transaction itself, knocking out both sides, buyers and sellers, pocketing the cash but trashing the stash.”
Maven put forward a shrug. “Sounds good to me. I don’t see the problem.”
“Problem is, that’s my job they’re doing. And not doing it well. Busting up sales without jailing any dealers just ramps things up out on the street. Makes bad people paranoid, and paranoid people crazy.”
Maven said nothing, waiting.
“This spring, I had this importer, name of Gilberto Vasco, a Venezuelan, highly placed, thaw out dead in the Charles, his hands and tongue cut off. Seems he’d been taken off by these guys a few months before. Now you say, ‘What’s one less drug dealer?’ And you’re right. No argument from me. But dig this. These bandits who maybe think they’re on their way to becoming folk heroes — this murder could just as easily get pinned on them. So there’s that.”
Lash was looking for a reaction. Maven tried hard not to give him one.
“Here’s another funny thing I figured out. All the drugs being junked and the money being stolen — as much as I can guesstimate, anyway — source from two of the three kingpins in the Greater Boston area. Three pipelines of product, two of which keep getting blown up, while the third — it just keeps flowing. Untouched.”
Maven didn’t know how much of this was true. Maybe Lash was trying to trick him. “Again, I don’t know what—”
“Somebody’s taking drug profits off the table. Upsetting the balance of things. Now this shit is starting to boil over, it’s coming to a head. I’m telling you this vet to vet. Something’s gotta give. The bottom line, if you need one, is that all this bullshit makes my job harder. And I don’t need the competition, or the aggravation. I’m gonna put a stop to it, one way or another.”
Lash fished around inside his pocket for something, a business card. He scribbled his mobile number on the back, then tucked the card into Maven’s jacket pocket with a generous smile.
“See you around.”
Unstoppable Ninjas
Maven still considered himself faithful and loyal to Royce. He did this by confecting a clear rationale for his actions: he was not hooking up with the girlfriend of the man who made him; he was hooking up with a girl about whom he used to fantasize. It was a separate thing, a special thing. Danielle was like a dream he could slip into at will.
This druglike high of sexual attraction made bearable the drug-sick lows, the yearning, the worry. They had hooked up twice since, once in a Marriott in Natick, once at a Hilton in Dedham. Maven tried to avoid Royce, without seeming to avoid him, a plan that could last only so long. He tried to avoid Danielle too, at least when in the others’ eyes. The subterfuge wore on him.
He heard his own paranoia echo back at him in the voices of the marks they were snooping on. The dealers were consumed with security measures. The Sugar Bandits were deep inside their heads, haunting every move. They had their cop running criminal checks on any passing car deemed suspicious, which made them tricky to eyeball. Maven didn’t like the resulting lack of physical surveillance. It didn’t feel complete, leaning so heavily on telephone intercepts and ghost-phone spooking. Like listening to a movie on radio. Getting maybe 40 percent of the details and having to intuit the rest.
The cop: he was the key to all this. Instead of making their job harder, he actually made it a little bit easier because, as the dealers’ perceived ace in the hole, they took few other special precautions. The cop boasted of his knowledge of security measures and hinted at some special insight into the inner workings of the bandits. The exchange was to be a standard meet, consummated at a Hyde Park auto repair shop owned by one of the cop’s friends. A transport truck would rendezvous with them at the Sturbridge rest area of the Massachusetts Turnpike and be tailed on the highway by the cop in his personal vehicle. He would provide a similar pickup for the sellers. This hours-long prelude to the deal only spoke to the cop’s ignorance: the bandits could strike only at the point of transfer. Every other precaution was a waste of effort and time.
In puffing up his value to the dealers, the cop made out the bandits to be unstoppable ninjas with supernatural powers. They heard rumors about “Soviet-issued Uzis” and “government squads,” someone even floating the scenario of “a crew of renegade cops.” The cop insisted that the bandits had to have contacts inside the Boston Police Department drug unit, the “secret squirrels,” which he would neutralize by monitoring them on his police radio’s scrambled channels. He also warned the dealers to keep a keen eye out for helicopters.
The one thing the cop did right was to pick up a half dozen new “throwaway” push-to-talk phones to distribute to the principals on the morning of the gig. The sellers, however, still carried their personal mobiles, one of which had been ghosted into a broadcaster. So Maven gleaned enough from one-way conversations to be able to time their arrivals.
The auto repair garage looked like a barn, with two drive-in bays and a small, windowed second floor set around the corner from the street. A large and incongruous tree shaded one side, an old factory behind it having been turned into warehouses, only one-third occupied but empty at night. The nearest residence was a good thirty-second walk down the street. Steady automobile traffic out on that end of Hyde Park Avenue provided decent noise cover.
Glade had set two getaway vehicles, each within an eighth of a mile of the job. Additionally, he had dropped off a stolen Subaru Outback that afternoon for an overnight brake-pad and oil change, now parked in the lot adjacent to the garage.
They approached on foot, after dark, Maven wearing armor underneath his jacket, blackout clothes, a face-hiding balaclava. He wore a Glock 17 handgun in the rear waistband of his pants, a “Mexican carry.” He’d downed an iced-coffee drink outside the Rite Aid down the street earlier and wasn’t sure now whether he felt actual dread now or just too much caffeine and sugar.
The transport was a box truck labeled EMPIRE MOVERS, a work vehicle from a legit moving company carrying actual cargo: discount patio furniture for delivery to an Ocean State Job Lot in New Hampshire. Fourteen hollow umbrella bases were packed with four-kilo bundles of ninety-plus-grade cocaine.
The cop circled the area once, then left to collect the buyers at an IHOP on Soldiers Field Road, with a quick stop to switch into his marked cruiser. After he was gone, Maven worked his way behind some shrubs at the corner of a tile warehouse diagonally across the side street.
The shop was quiet inside, a dim light visible through the blacked-out garage-door windows. He could not see the others, posted at varying distances from the shop, and came to feel that he was waiting an inordinate amount of time. Long enough for paranoia to seep in. He checked his timepiece — the one Royce had given him — then pulled the Glock, done over in dull gray matte and a nonglare finish, invisible in the night. He remembered Royce taking him aside the day before, telling him, “You handle this cop.”