The Exiled (4 page)

D
etective Raney,” the receptionist said. “We were wondering when you would get here.”

She sounded happy to see him, even relieved, as though they'd known each other a long while, or as though he were the hotel's most loyal customer.

“I had stops to make on the way.”

“Of course.”

She didn't ask for details, didn't seem the least bit curious. The one advantage to a crime scene buried in the hills: the media hadn't caught wind.

“The room is all paid for. Top floor in the back, like you asked. I just need your John Hancock.”

She handed Raney a pen.

“Oh, and you have a visitor.”

“A visitor?”

“Sheriff Bay. I told him he could wait in your room. I hope that's okay.”

“How long has he been up there?”

“About an hour.”

“I hope there's a TV.”

“There is, but it's busted. We put flowers on it. Makes the place homey.”

Bay was lying prone on the bed, arms folded across his paunch, feet dangling. He hadn't bothered to turn on the lights. Raney fumbled for a switch.

“Nice of you to take your shoes off,” he said.

“There wasn't anyplace else for me to sit,” Bay said. “These rooms were built just big enough for a bed and a nightstand, for reasons that should be obvious. The current owner bought it as a fixer-upper but never fixed it up.”

“Keeps the rates low.”

“I suppose. You know I have a guesthouse out at my place. Free of charge. Or we could bill the county, if that'd make you feel better.”

“Maybe next time.”

“Suit yourself.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Sheriff?”

Bay pointed to an unopened bottle of Scotch and two shot glasses balanced on the windowsill behind the bed.

“A housewarming,” he said.

“Sheriff Bay, you just might be the kindest man I know.”

Raney maneuvered his suitcase into a narrow space between the bed and wall, set his holster on the nightstand, kicked off his shoes. Bay passed him a glass.

“I don't remember you being this hospitable the last time I came around,” Raney said.

“I brought you something else, too.”

Bay pulled a manila folder from under the pillow beside him.

“Interpol came back fast with those prints,” he said.

Bay tossed him the folder. Raney set his glass on the TV next to a vase of fake orchids. He opened the file, skimmed the top page, paraphrased aloud.

“Cartel kids. Twins. Ramon and Luisa Gonzalez. Low-level border hoppers, picked up twice apiece for possession with intent, released both times thanks to a big-name lawyer neither of them could possibly afford.”

Raney paused, turned the page.

“But their uncle could,” he said.

“Their uncle?”

“Sergio Gonzalez, capo in the Nuevo Milenio cartel. I remember him as a lieutenant from my narco days. Ran a pipeline all the way up to Montreal. He must have gone into business for himself. That doesn't happen without a body count.”

“What did Jack get himself mixed up in?” Bay said.

“Nothing he has to worry about now.”

“That's kind of cold, even from you.”

“He killed that girl. He raped her first, or tried to.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bay said. “Jack never was worth much. God rest his soul.”

Raney drained his glass, reached out for another.

“You mind if I ask you a question?”

“What's that?”

“Why are you here?”

“To give you that file,” Bay said.

“You live forty miles out of town and you waited here an hour to give me information I couldn't possibly do anything with until morning?”

Bay set his glass down.

“You're right,” he said. “I've got a confession to make.”

“Should I Mirandize you?”

“This ain't a joke, Raney.”

He waited for Bay to say more.

“I should have told you earlier.”

“Told me what?”

“I had no business sitting in on that interview.”

Raney smiled, tapped at a plastic flower with his index finger.

“You, too, Bay?” he said. “Mavis is all right, but she must have more than meets the eye.”

“It's not the kind of thing I'm inclined to do on a good day. I don't want to make excuses, but Jack never did treat her right. Not since the day they met.”

“Then why didn't she leave him?”

Bay shrugged.

“I wish I could say.”

“How long ago?”

“Thirty-plus years. And we've been nothing more than cordial since.”

“Relax, Bay. She probably doesn't remember.”

“Don't be an ass.”

“I'm kidding,” Raney said. “Besides, my skeletons could eat yours for breakfast. Still, you shouldn't have been in the room. It's not like she confessed, so I don't think it can hurt us at trial. But you'll have to keep your distance.”

“It's a little early for you to be talking about trial.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don't think so?”

“No.”

Bay rubbed his stubble with the backs of his fingers.

“You're out on a long limb with this one, Raney.”

“She knew about the drugs. She told one of her latest boyfriends that Jack was using.”

“Doesn't mean she knew he was selling.”

“The one is a stretch without the other. She's involved, Bay. You're right, though: there was more to the job than she could have handled alone.”

“So what's next?”

“We need to focus on the missing coke. I'll take another go at Mavis in the morning. I know some things now that I didn't know when we started.”

“You might bring Junior a cup of coffee. An Americano, with just a little cream. I wasn't kidding about the narcolepsy.”

Bay stood, stretched out his arms. “Let's end this day,” he said.

“Sounds good. Thanks again for the hooch.”

“Don't mention it. But I would like to hear about those skeletons sometime.”

Alone, Raney walked into the bathroom, dug his handkerchief from his pocket, set both dimebags on the vanity. He stared down at them, feeling more curiosity than craving. It made no difference how many addicts and dealers wound up brain-dead or bankrupt, died in jail or the gutter. Everyone who snorted a line managed to believe they were the exception.

As if by instinct, he lifted one of the bags, tapped half its contents into the toilet, watched the granules swirl and vanish. He hid what was left in a pair of socks at the bottom of his suitcase.

Y
ou look like you got your ass kicked,” Dunham said. “Funny thing is, so do I.”

He was standing outside, wearing the same suede jacket, smoking a joint under the bright light of a streetlamp, flanked by sullen-looking bouncers.

“I'm most of the way healed,” Raney said.

“Yeah, me too. You find the place all right?”

Raney nodded.

“They got me buried out here. But fuck 'em, I made lemonade. This bar was a beer-and-shots dive when I showed up. Two hundred grand later and you'd think you were in the Village. People dress up to eat here now. Even the citizens of Staten Island deserve a nice place.”

The interior wasn't what Raney expected. He'd imagined a dropped ceiling, dartboards, duct-taped bar stools, a scattering of middle-aged drunks. What he found was more supper club than saloon: polished wood floors, tacky but expensive chandeliers, cloth table runners, candles floating in ceramic bowls, a jazz trio playing on a platform stage. He stood with Dunham at the back of the room, Dunham tapping his foot, scatting under his breath.

“I pay them in blow,” he said. “It's the only way to get them out here.”

“They sound legit,” Raney said.

“In another life, I'd have been a sax player,” Dunham said. “I've got every record Coltrane made. Hard to picture, right? Boxing and music are the only two things I give a shit about. So how did I end up the prodigal errand boy, banished to a trash heap?”

“Seems like you're doing all right.”

“There are worse ways to fail. I could be making change in a tollbooth. They say those people earn good money, but I'd lose my shit with the fumes and the honking.”

There was a shift in the music; Dunham let loose a hard round of applause. People at the tables turned to look.

“The schmucks out here don't know to clap after a solo,” Dunham said. “Come on, I'll show you around.”

He led Raney into a small but state-of-the-art kitchen, introduced him to a short, round man in an apron and a puffy chef's hat. Raney wondered if Dunham made him wear the hat.

“This guy is topflight gourmet. He's a chef, you know? Not a cook, a chef. His name's Benny, but I call him Pierre. Guys named Benny twirl pizza dough in the air. Pierre, give our friend Deadly something to taste. A spoonful of your chowder, maybe.”

Benny found a spare ladle, dipped it into a vat, handed it to Raney.

“Salt pork and bay leaves,” he said. “That's the key.”

“I buy him everything he asks for,” Dunham said. “Only the highest-quality ingredients.”

“Mostly everything,” Benny said.

“Pierre, don't start with me.”

“This is fucking delicious,” Raney said.

“See, I told you,” Dunham said.

Benny made a small bow.

“All right,” Dunham said. “We've got one more stop on our tour. Thank you, Pierre. You're a prince among peasants.”

Dunham pushed Raney back through the double doors, steered him down a hallway behind the stage.

“Don't take this wrong, but I want to show you the john.”

He knocked, then opened the door marked
GENTS
.

“I keep meaning to order one of those
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS
signs.”

He gave Raney a moment to take it in. The room was a nearly uninterrupted mosaic of small encaustic tiles. They covered the walls, the ceiling, the base of the toilet, the sink. Raney found no principle guiding their arrangement, no pattern or color scheme. Like taking a shit inside the mind of a madman, he thought.

“I've never seen anything like it.”

“The work relaxes me,” Dunham said. “I had a guidance counselor in junior high who told me my personality type ‘couldn't be left to its own devices.' She wanted to bus me to a school for exceptional children. I never knew if that meant gifted or retarded. I paid a kid from the hood to slash her tires. I had him do it with witnesses around so no one could say it was me. She knew, though. She never brought up the exceptional thing again.”

Dunham switched off the light.

“Now let's take a little ride,” he said.

Back in the main room, he blew kisses to the musicians.

They drove over the Goethals into Jersey.

“Where we going?” Raney asked.

“Someone whose name you don't need to know is venturing into the real estate business. He bought himself a row of crack houses. Brownstones. Nice homes in their day, whenever the fuck that was. This person wants to make them nice again, but he needs certain individuals to vacate first. These individuals are being disagreeable. Our job is to make them agreeable. You got your piece?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. We're talking about rousting some half-dead tweakers, so a couple of fear-of-God shots and a pair of baseball bats oughta do. Normally I'd say go for the kneecaps, but we want them to walk away. Tweaker bones break easy.”

The informant was right: Dunham talked nonstop, talked in overlapping words, as though there were a backlog of sentences stacked vertically in his mind, one sliding off the other. He talked about last week's fight at the Garden, about his own amateur career, about the warehouse matches, about traffic, about the chemical stench that flooded parts of north Jersey, about his predilection for strippers and the virtues of fucking them in the shower. He shouted over the local jazz station, smoked without dropping a syllable. The constant stream made Raney's job easy. He didn't have to spin stories about Dixon's childhood, didn't have to account for his bit upstate. He just listened.

They pulled off the Turnpike, rolled through a low-end suburban neighborhood, came out in a ghetto with crews mixing on every corner.

“This is our block right here.”

He cut the music. A corner kid spotted them, put down the paper bag he'd been sucking from, and shouted, “Five-O.” A half dozen runners scattered from in front of a bank of pay phones. Dunham laughed himself to tears.

“‘They startle easily, but they'll be back, and in greater numbers,'” he said. “You recognize that? That's from
Star Wars
. Goddamn, the little shitheads think I'm a cop.”

“It's the threads,” Raney said.

Dunham tugged at his jacket collar.

“No narco could afford this.”

“He could if he was dirty.”

“You're saying I look like a dirty cop?”

“Isn't that a good thing?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Dunham slowed the car, pointed to a sagging brownstone near the middle of the street.

“That's her.”

The front door was sitting off its hinges, propped against the frame. The windows were boarded over, the boards tagged with graffiti.

“So how do we play it?”

“We'll go in from around back. Otherwise the corner boys might get curious. These fiends are their bread and butter.”

He coasted down the alley with the headlights off. Chain-link fencing lined both sides. Trash spilled from one yard to the next: three-legged chairs, rusted bicycle frames, cracked kiddie pools. Nothing of value. Nothing that could be scrapped or traded.

A pit bull almost impaled itself trying to get at them.

“What a beauty,” Dunham said. “A damn shame. I'd have her eating from my hand inside of a week.”

“I'd like to see it.”

“I'm shit with people, but animals love me. That's how I know I'm not a sociopath. I never killed any bunnies when I was little.”

The back of the house looked even worse than the front. An electrical cord ran up to the second floor and through the only window that remained intact. What had once been a porch was now rubble. The fence was torn out, the yard crowded with shopping carts.

“They're waiting for the new Ford model,” Dunham said.

He cut the lights, switched off the engine. The alley went dark.

“I've got two ski masks in the glove compartment. Put one on.”

Dunham reached behind him, took a pair of aluminum bats off the backseat.

“Remember,” he said. “The idea is to fuck a few of these skels up so bad the whole block scatters.”

“Looks like most of them left already.”

“We need them all to leave.”

Dunham glanced up and down the alley. Raney stood beside him, felt something greater than adrenaline take hold—power laced with fear, an almost giddy anticipation.

“Christ,” Dunham said. “We're about to make some shitty lives a whole lot shittier.”

They flipped a shopping cart, climbed up through what had been the porch door, and entered a gutted kitchen—appliances gone, sink gone, electrical wire torn from the sockets. A narrow hallway connected the front and back of the house. Two rooms on the left, staircase on the right. Light flickered through bare door frames. A slow and droning conversation seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

“You want the front or back?” Dunham asked.

“Front.”

Front gave him a chance to clear the room before Dunham could survey his work.

“All right,” Dunham whispered. “If the upstairs junkies slip past us, who gives a shit? We're looking to send a message. Just make sure it's a clear message.”

Dunham pulled the Glock from his waistband. “Fear-of-God time,” he said.

He fired three rounds into the floor. Raney jetted, suppressed a
Hands, hands, show me your fucking hands.
Inside, three skels huddled around a garden-pail fire. Skel 1 was tied off, a needle jutting from his bicep. Skels 2 and 3 were roasting marshmallows on chopsticks, calm, as though the sound of Dunham's Glock had died in the kitchen. Raney spotted a fourth lying under the front window, wrapped in blankets. The Boy Scout skels saw him, dropped their sticks, stood with their hands folded behind their heads. Glassine eyes sunk deep in sallow faces; no meat and hardly any bone. Impossible to guess an age, to say if they were twenty-five or fifty. Their friend was weaving through a heavy nod. Raney fired at the floor near his feet. The man raised himself up, fell face-forward, jerked back when the flames licked his forehead.

“Get him out of here,” Raney hissed.

He tucked the gun back in his waistband, lifted the bat over his head, swung at the empty vials scattered across the floor.

“This is your fucking eviction notice.”

“Jesus, man. We wasn't hurting nobody, we just…”

Raney palmed the handle of his gun.

“You ain't hearing me. Run, motherfucker. You don't live here anymore.”

They hobbled off, dragging their friend between them, protesting in a flatlined drawl Raney couldn't decipher. He started for the man in the blanket, stopped at the sound of Dunham's voice echoing from the other room.

“Did everyone here just shit themselves at once?”

Raney heard what sounded like a body hurled against a wall, then a woman screaming. He stepped into the hallway, wondering how he would play it if Dunham went too far, wondering what
too far
meant. A pair of eyes gleamed down from the top of the stairs. Raney waved the man on, raised his hands as a sign of peace. A small militia of junkies came barreling down the staircase, tripping, bouncing off the remains of an oak banister.

Dunham:

“So you're a hero now? You'd bash her head in yourself if I gave you a dimebag to do it.”

He let loose another round. The woman lost her voice, started dry-heaving.

“What? I didn't touch you.”

Two more shots followed by a scattering through the hall, one of the junkies yelling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” another gripping his head, blood spilling through his fingers. Then Dunham smacking the woman around, taunting her: “It must be easier to suck dick with no teeth.” Enjoying himself. Raney thought: One day soon, I'm going to put this fucker down. He fired into the stairs, hoping to draw Dunham's attention. The woman went quiet. Raney stepped back into the front room, emptied the pail onto the floor and stomped out the flames.

Dunham appeared in the doorway, dragging a female skel by the hair, dangling her an inch off the ground. Her coat was three months out of season, her feet bare.

“Jesus, Deadly,” he said, nodding at the man in the corner. “You missed one.”

“I was getting to him,” Raney said.

“He must reek like sewage under all those blankets. Come on, let's finish this.”

Raney walked over, jostled the man with his foot. Nothing. He pressed the barrel of his bat against the man's temple.

“Get the fuck up. Now.”

Nothing. A hard kick to the ribs. The man didn't stir. Raney turned to Dunham.

“I think he's dead.”

“Take out your piece and make sure.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Raney felt the bat being pulled from his hand, looked down, saw a long blade swing for his thigh.

“Holy shit,” Dunham said. “It's alive.”

Raney jumped back, reached for his gun, but the man was on top of him.

“Gonna cut you, motherfucker.”

Raney backpedaled, his hands up, the man following, slicing hard and fast, Dunham laughing, his female skel begging to be let go.

“Handle this, Deadly,” Dunham called. “Come on, handle it.”

The man drew his arm back and lunged. Raney slipped him, saw the knife stick in the wall, saw the man struggling to jerk it free. Raney kicked his feet out from under him, jumped on his chest, pummeled him unconscious. He stood, breathing hard, burying his face in the crux of one arm.

“Nice, Deadly! Nice.”

Dunham stepped forward, jerking the woman with him.

“This guy a friend of yours, darling?”

She shook her head.

“He's no skel,” Raney said.

“Sure he is. He sobered up inside is all. Look at him—he's still got his yard muscle.”