“Your boss. Royce.”
Maven floated like a bubble suspended in molasses. Someone overturned the jar and he slowly rose to the top.
“That name sure opens your eyes.”
Maven had to check himself. Had he given up Royce’s name?
He tried to fix on the voice of his interrogator, but felt his eyes lolling in their sockets.
“I’m figuring things out about you. Things just coming to me through the air. You can speak, can’t you?”
The other man, the one with the accent, was over Maven now, pressing down on his wounded thigh. Maven’s vision went blazing red. He grunted.
“Good. Gotta make sure I’m not fucking throwing darts at a board that doesn’t have a bull’s-eye.”
The seagull sat on the back of the chair. Looking at Maven for a long time.
He tried to talk to it. The bird opened its wings and alighted on his thigh.
It stared awhile, then began picking at his surgical wound.
It flew away with stitching trailing from its beak.
“I’m starting to wonder if you even know.”
Maven knew that his only power here was his silence.
“Remember the cranberry bog? What do you think happened there? You got ambushed, didn’t you? Somebody got tipped off. They were waiting for you.”
The cranberries. Maven felt like one of them now, floating on the surface of consciousness, waiting to be picked and crushed for his juice.
“Who do you think did that? It wasn’t me. My guys came in at the end, on a late tip from one of the buyers, who used to deal with us. Losing business to you punks was bad enough, I couldn’t have this fuck freelancing all around. Honestly I didn’t expect much. Mr. Leroy insisted on going. You see, his partner was killed at that Black Falcon clusterfuck. And he’s none too happy about it.”
Maven’s head was pulled up by his hair, and he was looking into the other man’s eyes.
“You remembering any better now?”
He tried. When he was alone. He tried to remember.
He ran his hands over his body, searching out his wounds. His lower back, his shoulder, his thigh. Tracing the surgical scars was like piecing together the sequence of the farmhouse shooting.
Glade and Suarez inside. They never had a chance.
And Termino?
“Hotshots, right? Thought you had it all. You were smarter than everyone else.”
Maven’s arms were tied to the bed now. Strapped down at his sides.
“This silence of yours, what is it? Loyalty? It’s your dumb loyalty, isn’t it. That’s the key. See — I’m learning to listen. Here I thought I was going to be the one ripping info out of you. But it’s me sitting here with the hammer of knowledge. Waiting to beat the truth into you.”
He was near the ocean. He could smell it sometimes. He could hear the surf roaring. Like a beast calling for him.
The seagull was back in the tree. He wanted to come back in. He wanted Maven’s eyes.
Maven awoke propped up on a few pillows. A notebook computer was set on his chest.
“Because I know you wouldn’t take my word for it.”
The man was in his chair, legs crossed. The other man, the white Jamaican, was behind him.
Maven’s right arm was unstrapped. He looked at the computer screen. This was some kind of trick.
“Go ahead. I put up some recent articles from the paper. You don’t have all day.”
On the screen were half a dozen windows open one on top of another. He had trouble reading the type and had to keep blinking and looking away, regaining his focus. So he could not read sequentially and instead had to absorb the writing in static chunks.
Massacre in Easton.
Cranberry Farmers Arrive Home to Bloodbath.
Nephew among dead in reputed drug deal gone bad.
Recent spate of Hub-area drug violence.
Maven scanned the print for names.
Curt Bellson.
James Glade.
Carlito Suarez.
The article noted the number of dead Iraq War veterans on the list. Three besides Glade and Suarez.
Sidebar: Veterans and Crime.
Another window, another article.
Gangland Slaying in Fort Hill.
Broadhouse, one of the kingpins, had been murdered in his home along with three associates.
Another window.
Milton Mansion Sees Night of Deadly Violence.
Crassion, another kingpin, dead. A so-called mob hit.
Sidebar: Recession brings consolidation, contraction in urban drug trade.
Another window.
Chelsea Piano Factory Shootout Claims Four.
Local Drug Baron Disappears.
A surveillance photograph showed a tough guy walking into a bar, a younger version of the man sitting in the chair. The caption gave his name as Lockerty.
The third kingpin.
“He hit us all. Bing, bang, boom. Only missed me because — guess what? — I was out here at the shore. With you.”
Maven let his head fall back. He was dizzy from reading and from the information gleaned.
“You still don’t get it, do you? It’s like I kidnapped a retarded kid nobody wants back.”
Maven lifted his head again to look at Lockerty.
“It’s Royce, you fuck. You did his bidding for months, knocking over the competition, cutting deep into mine and Broadhouse’s distribution. Yeah — Royce was Crassion’s boy. Until he turned on him a few weeks ago. I figured all this out. Crassion’s plan was to use his secret soldier Royce to jack his competition and, in doing so, squeeze street supply down to a dribble, raising prices all over town. You were Royce’s hit squad. I guess he needed you out of the way, cleaning his own house before he went scorched-earth. Set you up at that berry farm to end the bandit phase of the plan. A citywide coup. Crassion got what was coming to him, that fucking phony — and now Royce is king. Running everything single-handedly. An empire you helped him build.”
Maven looked again at the laptop on his chest. Was it real?
“You dumb fucking slug. See for yourself. Not like we’re setting you up a home office here. One more minute. Clock’s ticking.”
Maven didn’t know what to do. He looked at the keyboard, wondering how to prove Lockerty wrong. He tried opening up a search engine, but had difficulty getting his stiff hand to work. So he reread the articles he had.
In the “Related Articles” sidebar, he read:
Drug War Link to B.U. Grad’s Murder?
Maven stopped breathing. He moved his finger over the trackpad, trying to get the tiny arrow cursor on the highlighted article.
He finally clicked it and waited for the page to load.
He didn’t read any of it. He just stared at the photograph of Samara Bahaar, dressed in her cap and gown.
Hard Truth
The bloodletting around town in part vindicated lash. This didn’t mean that his overseas transfer wasn’t still going through: it was. Or that Windfall wasn’t going to die a slow death in someone else’s hands: it would. But at least he was able to stay out on the street, keeping active, making moves.
He saw Samara Bahaar’s parents at the police station but never spoke to them. The father wore a suit and the mother a yellow patterned sari. The father carried a fraud conviction from a few years back, and a ten-month bid. But nothing tied the murdered college graduate to the bandits. Her friends said that she had met Maven at Club Precipice some months before. They knew that his name was Neal, that he rode a motorcycle, and that he was a real estate agent. They thought he lived on Marlborough Street, though one friend insisted it was Commonwealth Avenue. The parents knew nothing of him, though her younger sister, a high school senior, confirmed that Samara had confided in her about a boyfriend named Neal, a Realtor who was not Indian, who had helped her find her new apartment.