Devils in Exile

Voodoo Doll

As Maven’s body healed, his mind deteriorated.

Left alone in the room, tied to the bed with nothing to occupy him, his brain began to feed upon itself. Eating away the better parts of him.

They let up on his sedation, though the straps remained. With no reason to interrogate Maven, Lockerty had taken to taunting, telling Maven what he and the Jamaican were going to do to him once he was fully healed. Lockerty thought he was mind-fucking Maven, but Maven was already well around the bend.

Royce visited one night. Standing back in the shadows, his arms folded, watching Maven lying in the bed.

“Danielle,” said Maven. “What did you do to her?”

Royce never answered, never moved.

“I try to put myself in that bed, you lying there helpless, knowing what’s coming. Knowing you will never see the outside of this room. And you don’t say anything. I want to know, how is it you’re not begging me for mercy? For anything?” Lockerty was up and walking around the chair, hiking up his pants. “At least give me the common courtesy of turning you down flat. Or — wait a minute. Are you dumb enough to still have hope? I want to know what keeps you going.”

Lockerty was turned away from Maven, stretching his back, when Maven said, “Revenge.”

Lockerty stopped. He turned. “It speaks.” Lockerty went back to the chair and sat down, newly engaged. He looked at his captive in the bed. “Go on.”

“You want to hurt me?” said Maven, his voice hoarse from disuse. “Get on with it. I’ve earned a beating. I deserve it. Not for ripping you off. For being a patsy. I’ll take whatever you give.”

Lockerty grinned. “Your tough talk is making me hard, soldier.”

“I’m gonna get through it. Whatever you got. It’s the only way.”

“Only way to what?”

Maven laid his head back upon the pillow. “To escape. And go after Royce.”

Maven was sitting up, more pillows behind his shoulders and head. The Jamaican stood behind Lockerty eating from a styrofoam take-out carton, something fishy.

Maven noticed the watch on the Jamaican’s wrist. Maven looked at his own bare wrist. It was his Oris.

“Admire is too strong a word, but I like your fortitude,” Lockerty was saying. “It makes me smile. Your fantasies of retribution. It’s pretty fucking funny, you down here making plans.”

“It’s no fantasy.”

“No? You’re going to will it to happen?”

“What else do I have?”

“I love the spirit. You are a true American, kid. A dreamer and a fool.” Lockerty looked outside the window, the first time Maven had seen him do that. “What you don’t know is, my entire organization, everything I built, is gone, kaput. Me? I’m fine, I’m out here now. I got my head and my balls. I got fire still. You?” Lockerty shrugged. “Even say you did somehow magically escape. The game has changed out there. Royce has all the muscle now. He pulled in Crassion’s organization and added some of his own. Nobody knows where he coops because that’s how he wants it. Otherwise I’d be out there now, instead of here with you. So what makes you think you could succeed before I would?”

“You’re afraid of him,” said Maven. “I’m not.”

A flicker of a smile passed over Lockerty’s face, masking his anger. The words hit a little too close to home. “Is that what it is?”

“That’s why you keep me here like a voodoo doll against him, sticking pins and needles in me.”

Lockerty forced a smile, to prove that he was still enjoying himself. “You shoulda started talking a long time ago.”

“I was amusing myself with these thoughts today, these scenarios.” Lockerty stood by the window now, leaning against the frame. “I was thinking how funny it would be, how fitting, if I did turn you loose after all. Sent you off on your merry errand.”

Maven’s eyes betrayed nothing, no hope or desire. His future did not hinge on Lockerty’s charity because Maven could no longer be deceived into believing that such a thing existed. No one could ever break his heart again because he no longer had a heart to break.

“His own soldier going after him. Good sport, right? Good opera. In theory.”

Maven said, “You don’t want to do that.”

Lockerty knit his brow, flicking at his ear to show that he didn’t think he had heard Maven right. “Not let you go?” He was more intrigued than before. “Why is that?”

“Because after I get through with Royce, I’m coming back for you.”

Lockerty’s hard stare eventually dawned into a smile.

Maven woke up to find someone sitting at the edge of his bed. Not a man but a kid, a teenager, his back to Maven, doing something with his hands. Making a repetitive flip-flip-flip noise that Maven recognized, but not right away. Not until the kid turned and Maven saw his face.

It was Maven himself. The adolescent time bomb, obsessively practicing the flicked-wrist opening of a butterfly knife.

Maven startled awake. Pain in his arm as he thrashed about.

The white Jamaican was pulling away from him — an empty syringe in his hand.

Maven tried to get up, forgetting the straps. “What did you do to me?”

“It’s time, soldier,” said Lockerty. “You know nothing, you are nothing. Even as an object of my wrath, you failed. That’s epic emptiness, pal.”

Maven’s arm throbbed. Something working its way through his veins into his heart, then his entire body beyond.

“Time to cut my losses and move on. But first — Mr. Leroy here needs to get something from you.”

The Jamaican came at him, smiling, with something in his hand. A knife with a small, curved blade — and he set upon Maven, carving into his face.