The Town: A Novel (39 page)

“It’s cheaper than a car.”

“Lasts longer too,” said the saleswoman, smiling.

Claire’s eyes never left the diamond. “I almost wish you wouldn’t.” She turned her head and watched it sparkle. “I did say
almost,
didn’t I?”

The saleswoman nodded. “Will that be credit, or do you need to finance?”

“Cash,” said Doug, reaching for his pocket.

C
LAIRE STOPPED BEFORE A
window a few shops away, checking her reflection again, this time over a display of fountain pens and sport knives. She touched her collarbone in exactly the same manner as the women in diamond advertisements. “I have to buy a whole new wardrobe now, just based around this.”

Doug noticed her bare wrist. “There was a matching bracelet too, you play your cards right.”

She admired it a few more moments before her hand fell away. “I should never have let you buy me this.”

“Why not?”

“Because. Because the intent on your part was enough. The impulse you felt—I love it, whatever prompted it. That was the magic. A stronger person maybe, she would have told you that—and meant it—and let it go right there. A more secure person, maybe. But you didn’t have to do this.”

“The guilt,” marveled Doug. “It’s immediate.”

“It is, isn’t it?” she admitted, smiling a moment. Then she turned toward him, the smile gone. “Doug—I did something today, I have news.”

A little heat came into his forehead. “What’s that?”

“I quit my job.”

Doug nodded slowly. “The bank.”

“I had to. And really it was only a matter of time before they fired my ass.” A flash of a smile at her slang, again quickly replaced by earnestness. “I was slacking off so much, I was no use to them anyway. Ever since the robbery… I won’t bore you with that again, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. Not because of what happened there. Because of me. I needed to make a clean break. I just—I can’t believe I actually did it.”

“It’s sort of sudden, though, isn’t it?”

“I guess. Why?”

“I’m just thinking about the police. A few weeks after the robbery… and now you’re quitting the bank.”

Her hand went to her open mouth. “Oh.”

“I mean, maybe they won’t…”

“That never even occurred to me. You don’t think…”

He did. This was sure to bring renewed attention from the FBI. And if they started watching her, how could he keep seeing her and stay out of their crosshairs? And then, if they ever put him and Claire together…

That made him think. “You still talk to that FBI agent?”

Her hand came away from her mouth. “You think he’ll be talking to me again?”

Doug felt icy suddenly. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this before. “What’s he look like? Anything like on TV?”

They were moving again, through the Copley Mall toward the escalators, the Tiffany & Company bag dangling in Claire’s hand. “He said he’s a bank robbery agent, that’s all he does.”

“What’s he like, a haircut in a suit?”

“Not hardly. He actually lives in the navy yard somewhere.”

“The yard, huh?”

“Like my height, maybe an inch taller. Thick brown hair, kind of wavy-curly, all over the place. In fact—it’s probably gone now, but he had this reddish sort
of stain on his skin from this guy he was chasing, a bank robber who got a dye pack. Do you know what a dye pack is?”

They were on an elevator going down, which was lucky, because Doug could barely move.

Too convoluted, the whole thing. Too massive, he couldn’t break it down. Had he fucked up? Had this bank sleuth somehow been feeding off him through Claire?

He watched her at the revolving doors, pausing in her story about the bank robbery agent getting stained in order to eye her necklace again in the reflective chrome.

She knew nothing. Maybe the sleuth knew nothing either. Maybe.

Outside, they crossed a brick-and-stone plaza, commuters flooding the street from the Back Bay station, jumping curbs and chasing down taxis. Claire took his hand. “Delayed sticker shock?”

“No,” he said, coming back around. “What are you going to do now?”

“Right now? I don’t—”

“No, I mean—now that you’re out of a job.”

“Oh. I’ve got some money saved, I have a cushion. What do I
want
to do?” She looked up at the tops of the skyscrapers. “Stay out of banking, that’s for sure. My parents are going to freak out. I thought about teaching, but—what I do with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club, that’s not really teaching. It’s not social work either. It’s nothing you can make a living at. Though I did talk to the director over there, in case a paid position opens up.”

Thoughts came to him as fast as the commuters swarming around them. “What would you think,” said Doug, “if I quit my job too?”

She laughed a little. “I guess then I’d have company. But why?”

“I got some money saved too. My own cushion. Hell, I got a whole sofa stashed away.”

They walked a few more steps against the crowd, then she looked up at him, remembering the necklace. “A whole sofa, huh?”

“Matching love seat, even.”

Everything seemed threatened now, everything converging. Like his old life had suddenly been condemned, explosive charges being laid on all the loadbearing beams, a crew of badass demo hard hats advancing on it with crowbars and sledges.

“You know how everybody’s always got that place they want to go—their
if-only
place? You know,
If only I had the money,
or,
If only I had the chance
.”

Claire nodded. “Sure.”

“I never had a place like that. I bet you do.”

“Only about half a dozen.”

“The problem is—no one ever goes to their if-only place.”

“No, they never do.”

“Well, why not? Why couldn’t we be the first?”

She smiled, finding a different angle on his face, discovering something there. “Know what, Doug? You’re a romantic. I think I knew it all along, only you hide it so well.”

“Things are changing for me, Claire. Changing fast, like hour to hour.”

“There’s one small problem I foresee with your if-only plan.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled. “There’s no Charlestown anywhere else in the world.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that is a snag.”

And he left it floating there like that: mere talk. Twenty-six years ago his mother had walked away from the Town. Maybe now it was his time to follow.

C
LARK
M
AYORS WAS A
locksmith with a small key-making shop on Brom-field Street, one of the narrow lanes off the cobblestone boulevard of Downtown Crossing. The night-duty agent had given Frawley Clark’s pager number, the Boston FO being without a good lockpick and contracting the sixty-year-old keymaker for side gigs, both on and off paper. Clark was a careful, square-faced, solidly built black man with a pleasant, home-cooked smell and half-glasses over snowy cheek stubble. His no-questions fee of a hundred an hour was coming straight out of Frawley’s own linty pocket.

Just a few hours before, Frawley had been sitting in the backseat of his new Bureau car, a banged-up, navy blue Ford Tempo, trying to stay awake half a block down from Claire Keesey’s door. The muscular growl of a Corvette engine roused him in time to see the two of them nuzzling in the front seat, then her getting out and going into her place alone. Frawley put off his plan to drop in on her then, instead rolling out after MacRay.

The bold green sports car seemed headed for the interstate, in which case Frawley wouldn’t bother trying to keep up, but then MacRay cut sharply toward the Schrafft’s tower at the last moment, crossing the Mystic north into Everett. He turned off Main Street down a dim residential road, Frawley thinking MacRay had made him, only to see the Corvette’s round brake lights turn into a driveway. Frawley backed off and waited, parked up on Main trying to figure out his next move, when just in time he recognized MacRay’s second car, the dumpy white Caprice Classic, parked right in front of him. Frawley took off and made a slow loop past a funeral home, and by the time he returned, the Caprice was gone.

Frawley’s adrenaline had hardly subsided from then until now, watching Clark work on the side door of a broad garage. The only light source was a pale blue spritz coming off the next-door neighbor’s backyard Madonna.

Clark first snaked a worm scope under the door, previewing the interior bolts and checking for alarms. His handheld, gray-and-white monitor showed no booby traps, nothing tricky. Then he hiked up his pants and knelt before the
padlock, a folded rag under his knee, an old black curtain draped over his shoulders and head to swallow his working light. Frawley kept an eye on the street—the neighborhood struck him as one likely to mete out swift street justice to housebreakers—listening to Clark’s patient click-scratches.

The cloak was whisked away and Clark straightened with a soft grunt, lifting his Klein Tools bag off the ground and nodding to Frawley. Frawley gripped the knob with his break-in gloves and it turned easily, no creaks or whines to worry the night. Clark followed him inside, Frawley quickly shutting the door.

Clark turned his flashlight back on—a white spray off a wire hooked to his half-glasses—and found a wall switch screwed to an unfinished beam by the door. He gave the exposed box the once-over, fingering each electrical connection, and then with the aid of Frawley’s stronger Maglite, followed the stapled wires up to the ceiling rafters and the lamps clamped overhead.

Clark hit the switch and the lamps came on loud, the halogens blazing up the old garage. The muscle car glowed dead center, emerald against cement, a long, low, lustrous jewel resting on five-spoke, star-rimmed wheels.

Against the near wall was a red tool cart on casters and a built-in workbench under particleboard shelves of small parts, accessories, and tools ancient and new.

“Pretty thing,” said Clark, snapping off his spy light.

Frawley walked to the car and rested his gloved hand on the glass-smooth hood, expecting a pulse. It must have had half a dozen coats of paint. He slipped his fingers underneath the handle of the driver’s-side door and opened it wide.

The interior was black leather, still smelling like a new baseball glove. He lowered himself into the driver’s seat, the upholstery moaning but not protesting. He reached for the stick and toed the pedals, touching the leather-wrapped wheel. He would have needed to inch the seat forward to operate it comfortably.

“Dope dealer, huh?” said Clark, eyeing the finish, tool bag in hand.

Armor All slicked the dash. Frawley reached across the passenger seat for the glove compartment, and suddenly smelled Claire Keesey there, that butterscotch hair product she used. The car was registered to Kristina Coughlin of Pearl Street, Charlestown, Massachusetts. Underneath the registration card was a CD jewel case labeled
AM Gold
.

Frawley climbed out, shut the door. He moved to the workbench, sliding open each drawer of the tool cart, then checked the minifridge, pulling out a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. He cracked the cap and drank down half of it at a gulp. He peered into a cardboard-box trash can, but it was just empty Dew bottles and shop rags.

In the rear of the garage, the cement floor ended over the old wood framing, dropping down four feet or so to packed dirt. Frawley trained his flashlight on the yard tools rotting there, the bicycles and sleds, a limp tetherball game. The soil looked hard and unlikely to preserve his shoe tread, so he hopped down, exciting dust in his flashlight beam. Decades of oxidation gave the dark trench a metallic tang. He looked around but it was all just junk, and Frawley wondered what the homeowner’s relationship was to MacRay, making a mental note to run the address in the morning.

He was on his way back up when his beam found a head-sized stone loose from the rocky subfoundation. Its shadow moved when he did, betraying a hollow inside. Frawley shoved an ancient snowblower out of the way and crouched down before the stone and the scooped-smooth hole, like an eyeball tumbled out of its socket. The cavity was empty but for a few silica-gel packets, the Do Not Eat kind packed inside sneaker boxes to absorb moisture. Frawley put his face to the opening. The smell he got was the unmistakable old-linen odor of stored cash.

He stood, downing more Mountain Dew. MacRay had just recently moved his stash. If only he knew how close on his heels Frawley was.

Clark yawned up top, reminding Frawley that the meter was running. He climbed back to the cement floor, the Corvette gleaming proud. He tried to envision it torched. “You can lock it back up again from the outside?” asked Frawley. “Make it look like no one’s been in here?”

Clark nodded, his voice rug-soft and shag-smooth. “No time at all.”

“Go ahead and kill the light then, get set up outside. I’ll be right there.”

Clark switched off the rafter lamps and exited, leaving Frawley with his Maglite beam and the car. Frawley dug out his ring of keys, comparing them in the heat of his flashlight, the new Tempo key having the sharpest teeth. He walked to the long front fender of the Corvette and dug the key into the soft finish, gouging it across the driver’s-side door and all the way to the rear, then stepped back to admire his work.