Prince of Thieves

by Chuck Hogan

  The one dream he remembered was him watching the lottery drawing on his hotel-room TV, Claire Keesey in a sparkling lottery-girl gown pulling four zeros in a row from the ball machine, matching the ticket in Doug's hand.

  He paced, trying to keep himself holed up inside the room and away from trouble. All the time now he was thinking about that crappy baseball lounge in front of the hotel. Everything still so open-ended. The getaway he had set up for the job was a good one, maybe even a great one-- but he still had no getaway plan for himself. No getaway from the Town.

  He slipped out the rear hotel entrance at the end of the hall and did a circuit around the park's perimeter. He told himself it was just light recon, passing Boston Beer Works, Uno's, Bill's Bar, Jillian's. Anything could be endured, he thought, so long as it had a foreseeable end. What he needed now, and what he did not have, was a future worth being strong for. Suddenly it was obvious to him why he had been so reluctant to plan his getaway.

  Doug heard the players being announced over the Fenway PA system as he returned to the gardens on his third or fourth pass in as many days. Her plot looked empty, and it was almost with relief that he turned away, only to catch a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked back and there she was, standing in the middle of her garden.

  He gave himself no time to think or chicken out. His chest was a beehive as he walked to her gate, trampling his better judgment on the way, his mind telling him not to do this, his heart telling him he must.

  She turned when the latch clinked. A floppy straw sun hat veiled her shocked expression, her bare limbs glowing in the afternoon sun. White T-shirt and jeans shorts, a pair of pruning shears in her gloved hands. Her knees smudged with dirt.

  "Just let me say this."

  She took one step backward, the pruning shears falling from her grip. She looked pained, scared-- this was what seeing him did to her now.

  "I am hanging by a thread here," he said.

  She looked at him as though he were a man she had murdered, returned from the grave.

  "We can do this," he said. "We can, I know we can. We can make this work. If you want to. Do you want to?"

  "Just please go."

  "We met in a Laundromat. You were crying-- "

  "We met inside the bank you were robbing-- "

  "We met in a Laundromat. It's true if you believe it. I believe it. The rooftop, that first night? We are still those same two people."

  "No, we're not."

  "I took advantage of you. I admit that. And I would do it all over again, exactly the same, if it were my only chance to get close to you. Telling you I'm sorry for it now-- that would be a lie."

  She was shaking her head.

  "You want control over your life. You said that. You want to be in charge. I want to give you control over both our destinies. Everything about us, all in your hands."

  The words were tumbling out. She was listening. Doug pointed to the light towers above Fenway Park, behind her.

  "Monday," he said. "Two days from now. An armored truck will enter the ballpark to pick up receipts from this weekend's games. I'm going to be there."

  She stared. Frozen. Appalled.

  "I don't care anymore," said Doug. "About anything, except you. After this job, I am done. I am gone."

  "Why tell me this?" She made fists of her hands at her sides. "Why are you doing this to me?"

  "Frawley probably told you, what-- to report anything I say? Okay. What I just told you-- you could send me away forever. If you hate me, if you want me gotten rid of, that's the easiest way."

  She shook her head, hard. He couldn't tell whether that meant she wouldn't report him, or didn't want the choice, or didn't want to hear any more.

  "But if you don't," he said, "then come away with me. After. That's what I came here to ask you to do."

  She was too shocked to speak.

  "We'll ride out the statute of limitations together. Anywhere you want to go. Your 'if only.' "

  A horse's snort interrupted. Doug heard hooves clopping and saw Claire's eyes track left and widen. A mounted policeman was trotting down the path toward them.

  "You decide," Doug said, backing to the gate. "My future, our future-- it's all up to you."

  He was outside her gate now, surging with devotion, the horse hooves clopping near.

  "Doug-- " she started, but he cut her off.

  "I'm at the Howard Johnson down the street." He told her the room number and the name. "Either turn me in or come away with me," he said, then started back toward the ballpark, back toward the job.

  48

  Night Crawlers

  SATURDAY NIGHT FOUND FRAWLEY in a surv van down the block from the Magellan Armored Depot with a young agent on loan from the fraud squad named Cray. Dino had knocked off after the depot went dark at seven, the turnpike traffic overhead the slowest it had been in Frawley's week of watching, Cambridge Street giving over to the night crawlers shuttling back and forth between Allston and Cambridge, from bar to party to club. Cray, single like Frawley-- family men usually caught a break on weekends-- ran the radio awhile, a show called X Night, broadcast live and commercial-free from one of the dance factories on Landsdowne Street. A taste of what they were missing.

  The crew's activity around the depot had slowed to a trickle. Magloan was there yesterday for two hours with dark sunglasses on, the bug in his car picking up snoring. Coughlin had cruised the depot exactly once, though the Pearl Street detail reported a lot of activity in and out of his house. Elden was the only constant, parking there for lunch every day-- even that day when he had switched work trucks, ditching their bug.

  But most troubling to Frawley was that MacRay had all but fallen off the face of the earth. He hadn't been sighted near the depot in days, and his Caprice hadn't budged from its resident space on Pearl Street in a week. Frawley had raced to Charlestown when the Pearl Street surv spotted MacRay leaving the house, carrying what looked like laundry, but MacRay vanished again before Frawley arrived.

  He had expected the crew to keep their distance from each other in the run-up to the heist, but he should have been seeing a lot more prep activity in and around the target-- especially with Elden's day off from work just three days away.

  Krista Coughlin had hung up on Frawley twice. He worried that he had overplayed his hand with her, that she had gone to MacRay after Frawley's initial contact, maybe scared him off this mark.

  Cray tapped a pencil against the dash in time with the techno music, using the passenger seat as a desk upon which to read the case file. "Explosives, huh?"

  "It's a theory," said Frawley.

  "Three turnpike exits. This thing was made-to-order."

  Frawley nodded, then sat back against the van wall, thinking. He was quiet and still so long that Cray stopped tapping and looked over. "Ever play any hockey?" Frawley asked him.

  "You kidding? I grew up in northern Minnesota, closer to Winnipeg than Minneapolis. You?"

  "I ran track. Played a little basketball. Not being six-six, I used to have to fake a lot. Do you fake much in hockey?"

  "Sure, all the time." Cray moved his pencil over the file like a hockey stick. "You're on a breakaway, say. You and the goalie, one-on-one. You're charging in hard, he centers himself, stick down, elbows out. You draw back on a slap shot, bring the blade hard on a fake. The goalie commits. You've frozen him. You flip a little wrist shot past his skate-- and the hometown crowd goes wild."

  Frawley nodded, buzzing. After a moment he pushed open the back doors of the van and stood out on the dirt shoulder of the road. He looked at the double-fenced Magellan Armored Depot, and then to the turnpike overhead, the cars shooting into the city, thinking, And the hometown crowd goes wild.

  49

  The Suicide Room

  THIRTY-FOUR THOUSAND SEATS. Times three sold-out games.

  Equals one hundred thousand mouths.

  Saturday and Sunday matinees, loads of kids in attendance: multiple Cokes, beers, ice
cream; on top of programs, T-shirts, caps, souvenirs.

  Round it off. Say $25 average per mouth. Times one hundred thousand.

  $2.5 million.

  Adjust up for day-of-game cash ticket sales, down for coins-- call it even.

  Subtract Fergie's greedy 40 percent, then divide by four.

  Seven minutes of work = approximately $400K.

  * * *

  AROUND NOON WAS THE only time he left the room on Sunday. Walking the perimeter of the park before the game was the bare minimum of what he needed to do in terms of prep, and he kept his eyes off the taverns, cutting it short at the end to hustle back to 224, convinced that Claire would be there waiting for him. At the very least, there would be a message from her flashing on his phone.

  Nothing. He went through the whole lifting-the-receiver thing, making sure the telephone was working, then walked to the front desk to double-check that no messages had been left, then raced back to the room hoping the phone hadn't rung in the meantime.

  Around about the third inning he started to pretend he wasn't nervous. He opened the only hinged pane on his window and listened to the crowd noise across Van Ness, the game playing on his TV with the sound down. He paced. At one point he saw a female beat cop out on the sidewalk, and Doug pulled the shades, watching out of the window edge as the cop passed under the red light over the closed ambulance door. She turned the corner and never came back, and Doug told himself that it was exactly what it had looked like: a cop walking a beat. Not a uniform scouting out his room.

  Claire would never dime him out to the G. He had offered her the chance to put him away only because he knew she couldn't do it.

  It was the room that doubted her. The squalid little suicide room telling him that opening himself wide to Claire had been a mistake. Doug telling the room, Fuck you.

  Again and again he reviewed their encounter in her garden. If only she had told him to stop. Stop, for me. And he would have. He would have called off this job and walked away without a regret. He had come too far to risk their future together on one final score. Claire Keesey was his one final score. All she had to do was come to him now.

  He clung tight to this ideal of her, but as the hours passed, his faith began to pale.

  A burst of noise and movement outside his window brought him back to the sash, crouching. But it was only the game letting out. He stood like the fool that he was and walked the room, pacing back and forth past the telephone, the afternoon growing short.

  * * *

  AROUND SIX, DOUG TRIED on the uniform in front of the bathroom door mirror. With his size and haircut, he made a good cop. Too good-- the mirror cop looking at him like this was a big mistake Doug was making.

  Doug took the uniform off and walked the room in his underwear. Had Claire forgotten the name on the register? Somehow confused hotels?

  The impulse to call her was strong and wrong. Not even from a phone booth; they had her tapped for sure.

  He checked the view hole in his door for the umpteenth time, imagining Frawley and a SWAT team of federal agents setting up around the hotel, evacuating it room by room.

  He thought food might make him feel better, but by the time the Domino's guy arrived after eight, Doug was crackling with paranoia, studying the guy for cop traits, paying him quick and getting him out of there. He set the pizza box on top of the TV and never even raised the lid.

  * * *

  TEN O'CLOCK, HE WAS under a burning-hot shower trying to chase the crawlies away when he thought he heard knocking. He shut off the water and stood there listening to his dripping for a few, precious seconds, then grabbed a towel and walked damp to the door, opening it to the hallway.

  A woman stood in the middle of the corridor three doors down, turning fast to the sound of the opening door. It was Krista, not Claire, with Shyne a dead weight on her hip.

  Doug was too empty to say anything. He didn't move from the doorway, Krista coming before him, looking past his shoulder into the room, Shyne blinking slow-eyed against her chest. "Have any juice or milk or anything?" She held up Shyne's empty bottle. "I'm out."

  He backed away, moving into the bathroom to pull on pants. When he came out, Shyne was sitting straight-legged on the floor, sucking on a big, pink-handled face plug and hugging her bubba full of green Mountain Dew, staring at whatever was on HBO. Krista stood at the foot of the bed, looking at the cop uniform hanging on the door.

  "Dez told me you were staying here."

  "What do you want, Kris?"

  "To see you before you go."

  Doug raised his bare arms and let them fall again. "Seen."

  "To give you one last chance."

  "Kris," he said. He saw it all unfolding: Claire arriving late at his room, bags packed, only to find Krista and Shyne there.

  She sat down on the end of the bed. "Do you know my prick brother wouldn't even let me use his car?"

  "You can't stay. We're grouping up here in a couple of hours."

  "Like I'm his slave. Him and his bullshit, I've had it."

  "We're not using the cars, you know that. How'd you get here?"

  She shrugged. "I had no other choice."

  Doug moved to the window, seeing his Caprice parked at a slant in the lot below. Now the G would have his car at Fenway the night before the job. "You stole my car."

  "The registration says I borrowed my car."

  He looked back at her. "Where is this coming from?"

  "I'm ready to go away too. I've decided. I need the change, like you. Away from the Town, I think I can be a different person. Away from him." She glanced at the mayhem on TV, people running out of a burning building. "You know he's pissed at you leaving. Thinks you're hiding from him here. I said you're hiding from me." She looked back at Doug. "Which one of us are you hiding from?"

  "I'm not hiding."

  "He smoked tonight. He's dusted. Thought you'd want to know that."

  Doug rocked on his feet, squeezing his fists.

  "You know what's going to happen to him after you leave. Without you here, he's going to fuck up, and they're gonna come after his half of the house, and then where am I?"

  "They can't take the house."

  "Like hell they can't. Where's my security? Why am I still asking guys for rides, and washing Jem's frigging underwear?"

  "That's between you and-- "

  "It's not because of him that I've waited. That I've been so fucking patient all these years. I took Jem's shit only because I always believed my time was coming. My time with you. My whole life I've lived in terms of you, Duggy. What-- have I not been loyal?"

  "What does loyalty got to do with-- "

  "It has to do with fairness. It has to do with me being treated the way I deserve. I have been here since the beginning-- before Dez, and waaay before Joanie. I've been loyal and I've been patient. But I will not be left behind. I deserve not to be left behind."

  "Kris-- " he said, but had nothing to follow it up with, having no idea where all this was coming from. "Fuck is going on here? You want to go? Then go, same as me. There is no chain on any of us, holding us to the Town. Just the same, there's no chain holding us to each other, either."

  "You're wrong there." Her smile was out of place. "You're wrong."

  "You gotta give this up. Every day of your life, living in that same house, walking those same streets, looking up and always seeing the same patch of sky-- this is the result. Hanging on too tight, thinking that things can stay the same forever."

  "Just because we've been having some trouble, and you've been going through this thing-- "

  "It's not a thing," Doug said, needing to end this. "I am leaving. Leaving with someone else."

  He felt like shit saying it because he wanted so hard to believe it himself. Not because it hurt Krista. Krista had come there to be hurt. To make him hurt her, then use his pity to make him stay. That was why she came toting Shyne.

  "Kris," said Doug, glancing again at the mute phone. "We grew up together, you a
nd me. Like brother and sister-- "

  "Don't fucking sugar me off."

  "-- and it should have stayed that way. I wish it had. We were too close. It wasn't right."

  She stood and came to him. She reached out to his bare stomach, and his gut rippled, but he was backed up against the window. Her hands crept around his sides and she leaned into him, holding him. There was no way out of this clinch without getting rough. He let her hold him but did not return the embrace. He felt nothing for her. He watched Shyne flashing blue-green in the light of the TV, her body casting a small, flickering shadow. Then he looked at the door that Claire was going to knock on, knowing that Krista would ruin him if she had the chance.