Devils in Exile

Spanking

The windows of the corner office overlooked Government Center and Downtown Crossing. Lora Jeffers, the special agent in charge, came around from her desk and gave his hand a good shake, called him Marcus. Lash knew what was coming. She sat down and closed her laptop to see him better.

She started by listing his procedural lapses. Never registering his confidential source with the DEA. Using an informant with whom he had a personal connection. No Form 356 payment authorizations.

“I never paid him a cent,” said Lash. “He never asked, until this. Yes, we had a personal connection. He owed me his life.”

“No Form 512, the CS Establishment Report? No prints on file?”

“I knew who he was.”

“That’s not the point, Marcus, and you know it. № 473 Cooperation Agreement? Not one DEA-6 report? Nothing memorializing any of your contacts with him?”

“No paper whatsoever. He was too highly placed to go on the registry.”

“Not so far as the DEA is concerned. Not so far as I am concerned.” She placed her palm flat on top of her desk. “We use interdiction and eradication, Marcus. Title Three intercepts, surveillance...”

Lash tuned her out, looking over at the M. C. Escher prints on her wall. The hand drawing the hand; the stairs rising up and leading down at the same time.

When he came back, she was telling him, “You’ve got plenty of years in, enough to know the consequences. Nothing will happen officially until things settle. When it is to be done, it will be done quietly, out of respect for you. You’ll just have to dangle until events run their course.”

“You’re shutting it down. Just say it. The machine needs to run the way it’s always run. Someone will come in with orders to drive it into the ground until it can be called a failure and taken apart for good. Windfall is kaput.”

“Marcus, I do believe we have a case here where the old ways, the accepted ways, the proven ways, bear out. You lost a very valuable informant, and we have three agents in the hospital. You should count yourself lucky they will all survive.”

“What went wrong at the Black Falcon terminal had nothing to do with tradecraft. We walked into an ambush. That Jamaican wasn’t waiting for us. He wasn’t looking for cops to shoot. He was lying in wait for these Sugar Bandits who’ve been raising hell all over town.”

“These so-called Sugar Bandits are as much myth as they are substance. There is a turf battle going on—”

“If you’re going to make me eat crow here, then you’re going to listen to me talk with my mouth full. What I am saying is that there are big changes afoot. A sea change coming to the local scene. It is fully within your power to smack me down, but Windfall or no Windfall, something has to be done out there.”

Jeffers was just waiting for him to finish. “Be that as it may—”

“Oh, fucking Christ. Can I go?”

“What did you say?”

“I’ve taken my spanking. Am I excused?”

She fixed her eyes on him a moment, then reopened her laptop. “You are.”

Lash pulled up to the gated driveway on Brush Hill road in Milton and turned off his car. He scaled the stone wall and dropped down onto the other side, pulling out his badge in anticipation, heading straight up the driveway of crunchy gray stones.

Two gunmen came out of the trees near the circular arrival court at the head of the driveway. They carried AKs and wore inexpensive dark suits. The best-dressed gunmen in all of Milton, Massachusetts.

“I’m DEA, motherfuckers,” said Lash. “I’m here to talk to Crassion.”

“This is a private residence,” said one.

Lash showed them the badge again. “Shoot me or get the fuck out of my way.”

The house was a Victorian with a Boston flavor, three gables with deeply overhanging eaves, just short of a BBC-miniseries mansion. Lash counted five chimneys. The carriage house to the right was the size of a normal suburban residence, with room for more than four vehicles and living quarters above. Gardens and footpaths began behind.

The arched front door was unlocked, and he let himself into the foyer, under armed escort, getting angrier by the minute. Busting up one of the gunmen was a temptation, but it wouldn’t make him feel any better in the long run. He kept himself on simmer instead. Tricky’s death weighed heavily on him.

“Whatever happened to protocol, Agent Lash?”

John Crassion, a portly gent in his sixties, entered from the living room to the left, wearing a merlot-colored robe and slippers, a thin newspaper tucked beneath his arm. His gruff voice was the only indication of the South Boston boy he’d tried so desperately to leave behind.

Lash said, “Tell these two boys to go play.”

Crassion nodded to his men, and they stepped back. “At least let them frisk you.”

Lash shook his head. Not today.

Crassion shrugged. “This is criminal trespass anyway, so any recording you might be making, legally it would be about as admissible as a drawing of a gun. In here.” He pointed at his library with the newspaper.

He closed the twin doors behind them. Lash looked at the books lining the walls. “These come with the house?” Crassion sat in one of the tall-backed, leather chairs, but Lash remained on his feet. “Who is it you’re trying to fool with all this?”

“I am a person who never expected to breathe a day past age thirty. When I did, I looked around me and I smartened up. A man matures, Agent Lash. Not you?”

“You’re the regular American dream.”

Crassion frowned, realizing that Lash wasn’t in the mood for bullshitting. “What do you want?”

“I’m here to let a little light in. About these fucking bandits.”

Crassion nodded. “Heard of them.”

“Think I can’t read a fucking pattern? Who’s getting hit, who’s not? Broadhouse is out there arming himself to the teeth for a war. Lockerty brought in some crazy, fucked-up Jamaican to try and collect his own bounty.”

“The Jamaican who died at the Black Falcon terminal. I hear he has a half brother. I hope you’re going to visit Lockerty as well.”

“I am here to say that I am onto you. And these fucking bandits. I’m not going anywhere, is what I want you to know. I am not going to stop.”

Crassion digested that. “They’ve taken Windfall away from you, haven’t they?”

Lash weighed the pros and cons of taking apart Crassion right here in his study. But Lash needed to stay out of trouble in order to stay out on the street — to give himself a chance to put this fuck away.

Lash said, “I wouldn’t worry about my survival. I’d worry about your own.”

After Lash was gone, Crassion walked circles inside his library, hands deep inside the pockets of his robe. He knelt at a lower row of books, dumping gilt-edged antiquarian volumes of Hawthorne to the floor until he found the door to a small safe.

Inside was a mobile telephone, nothing else. He swapped in the battery from the wall charger and dialed the only number stored in the memory. The call went straight to voice mail, aggravating Crassion. He left a stern message before slipping the phone into his pocket, awaiting a call back.