One was a blond. The other Latino.
Neither one was Neal Maven.
Maybe the guy had been clean after all. Either way, this sure looked to Lash like the end of the Sugar Bandits’ reign.
He went back and checked the faces of the other armored corpses. It was speculation, but the haircuts and builds said military. “Bound to happen,” said Lash.
“You seem disappointed.”
“I wanted them for myself. When you run the prints, try military first.”
“You think?”
“These aren’t cons. These guys are soldiers.”
He parked outside Crassion’s gate, this time pressing the call button on the keypad. He pressed it a few times and got nothing back. So he went over the wall again.
He walked up the drive to the circular court, looking for the bodyguards. He reached the front door without being accosted. He tried the handle and the door opened.
Lash didn’t go inside at first. He brought out his cell and dialed 911. He identified himself to the dispatcher and asked to be put through to Milton PD. From them, he requested backup.
He drew his Browning Hi-Power 9 mm, readying the pistol with both hands. The foyer inside was empty and quiet. More than quiet. Lash listened, standing still.
A smell reached his nose. A tinge of cordite.
Then it was only a matter of finding the body. Which he did in the book-lined study where he had met with Crassion a few days before. The kingpin lay dead from a head shot that had blasted back part of his skull. The body wasn’t more than a day old.
Lash backed out and made his way through the house, room by room, door by door. No one else, and no sign of a struggle.
Crassion’s muscle had vanished. Lash wondered about that.
The Milton cops arrived and he badged himself and explained the situation. He then dialed the state police detective at the cranberry bog and told him to have his team grab lunch on the way over to Milton as soon as they were through.
Before he could hang up, he received a call from his office telling him of a shoot-out up in Fort Hill, at Broadhouse’s place. The news turned Lash’s chest cold.
Two Pins down, one to go.
Lockerty.
Whoever got the bandits didn’t seem all that interested in collecting their bounty.
The Shore
Maven struggled to consciousness.
Amber clouds floating above him came into focus as water stains on an old plaster ceiling.
He was in a bed. Mattress springs creaked as he turned his head. He made out a chair. He made out a window.
He tried to sit up but could not lift his head.
He looked to the other side and saw a bag suspended from an inverted coat hanger nailed to the wall. An IV bag.
He was on a drip inside someone’s house.
He tried to sit up again and kept trying until the room swirled and he fell into darkness.
Hey. Hey.
A voice, only.
You are mine now. Understand? Mine.
The anesthesiologist wet his lips as he picked through vials inside the messenger bag, looking for a twenty-milliliter ampoule of propofol. He shook it, warming the sedative in his hand. He noted that they had replaced the hydromorphone and Demerol, exactly as he had requested. He was alone in the bedroom but for the man in the bed, who was deeply unconscious.
He checked the IV lines in the manner of the doctor he had once been. He had learned to work with the shakes. He checked the closed door behind him, always afraid of being watched, then pocketed a syringe of midazolam for later.
He picked out a vial of vecuronium, an intravenous muscle relaxant more accurately defined as a paralyzing agent. Too high a dose would shut down the body’s respiratory system in minutes, leading to sudden death. The last time he had held a vial of vecuronium in his hand was inside the surgery bathroom of Mt. Auburn Hospital. When the police finally broke through the door, they found him dressed in blue surgery scrubs, sitting on the floor with a handful of stolen syringes in his lap, injecting propofol into the femoral artery of his left leg. He was an authority on the chemistry, pharmacology, and therapeutic considerations of the most potent and addictive medications available to humankind. And his one need in life now was to have access to these powerful narcotics. He had a significant court date coming up that would prohibit his access indefinitely, an eventuality that demanded its own solution, to be acted upon at the appropriate time. In his mind, he was drawing up an anesthesiologist’s dream last meal, a feast of opioids and sedatives for his central nervous system.
He administered the vecuronium in advance of the patient’s surgery, pocketing the rest. He watched the man in the bed, recognizing subtle changes in expression as the medicines took effect. The anesthesiologist would have traded places with him in a second, regardless of the man’s bullet wounds. He envied his patient — lying there, submerged within himself — and wished he could somehow split himself in two, administering to himself as patient while simultaneously riding out his own ministrations in blissfully schizophrenic codependence.
A seagull cried.
Maven opened his eyes. He watched the amber clouds until they were still.
The bed. The bedroom. A new bag hanging on the wall.
A man in a chair.
“You don’t know me?”
The man was older.
“You don’t recognize the face of the man you stole from?”
The face was that of a man you might sit next to in a coffee shop, flipping through a newspaper, never looking up.
Maven looked at the window. A seagull bobbed on a tree branch.
“I don’t know your name. I don’t know where you’re from. But I know you stole from me. And that is all I need to know.”
Another man stood behind the man in the chair. Maven could not see him.
“Why we waitin’? Dis bumbaklaat fool. He got my blood smoked. Be my personal pleasure reeducatin’ him.”
“This wounded animal? Too damn easy.” The older man stood over him now. “We’re gonna fix you up. Give you time to heal. Get you strong again. So we can break you.”
The surgeon examined his work and was frank about its shortcomings. He had many excuses available: the lack of assisting nurses; the unprofessional bedroom setting in this seaside house; the inferior surgical equipment. But he saw no sign of infection, which was itself a small miracle.
Obviously the patient was some sort of criminal, like the rest of these gangsters. Although they did not appear to regard the man as a comrade. In fact, quite the opposite.
Just fix him up.
Whenever the doctor edged toward asking why he was being paid to heal this man they appeared to detest—
Just fix him up.
The doctor warned them about the gas man, saying he had the patient under too deep.
Justfixhimup.
So, fine. He did. And if some carelessness crept into the surgeon’s work as a result of his treatment by these thugs, well then, too bad. Because you do not talk to people that way. Not if you want their best.
He had a weird, swimmy memory of something — a tube — being pulled out of his throat, like a stubborn carrot from the earth.
He was too stiff to stir. His brain was packed in cotton wadding.
An old man wearing shabby clothes and latex gloves leaned over Maven to check the IV bag. He lifted back the sheet with trembling hands, and Maven felt a vague sense of blunted pain, as an apple might feel a bruise.
The man, a doctor, was checking Maven’s wounds.
“I did my best,” he said, to no one in particular.
Maven tried to speak but his tongue would not work. He focused on the drip-drip of the IV feed, his eyelids drooping in sync.