The Exiled (2 page)

T
heir search of the house turned up nothing—no drugs, no ledger, no hint of who Wilkins bought from or sold to—nothing but the portrait of a relationship that had long since become something less than a marriage. Crafts magazines on the nightstand in her bedroom; potboilers on the nightstand in his. In one room, a small arsenal behind a display case, taxidermied bobcats and mountain goats ranging the walls; in another, an outsized loom, an easel holding up a half-finished painting of a wild iris, a picture window framing a hummingbird feeder, Navajo rugs on the floor. His and hers, alternating throughout the house. But what struck Raney was the unflagging sense that the home belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins and no one else. He could find no evidence that Jack and Mavis knew anyone but Jack and Mavis—no photos or postcards magnetically pinned to the fridge, no calendar to keep track of the occasional luncheon, no inscriptions in any of the books he thumbed through. Somehow, this absence seemed in keeping with a pervasive, almost obscene cleanliness. When the lab techs got here they'd be lucky to find a dust mite, let alone a wayward fingerprint. Each room felt like a diorama, a reenactment painstakingly assembled by an anthropologist and then freeze-dried for the edification of future generations.

He found Bay pacing outside, kicking at the gravel, smoking, swearing with every exhale.

“This ain't right,” he said. “It ain't like rousting meth heads or busting up bar fights. I've known Mavis going on forty years.”

Mavis, Raney thought. A matronly name. Almost an alibi in itself. Bay seemed to read his mind.

“You can't really think…”

Raney shrugged.

“Death by padlock,” he said. “The new woman's crime. Cleaner than poison.”

“She couldn't have known they'd kill each other,” Bay said.

“No.”

“So she left them down there to starve to death? While she went on about her business?”

“Somebody did. She's the only one who could have been certain they'd stay down there. Anyone else would have worried the wife might find them.”

“I know her,” Bay said. “Mavis ain't one to take life for granted. Hers or anyone else's. It don't figure.”

“Neither does half of what she said.”

Bay quit pacing, slumped down on the trunk of his car.

“What about the missing coke? No way a lady her size hauls however many bricks out of that bunker and then drives off with them.”

“I agree. Either someone put her up to it or someone helped her afterward. Or both. We need to figure out who. And we need a handle on Jack's business plan. He gets a package from Mexico, steps on it, and then what? Was he selling to locals, or did he run it up to Albuquerque? Or Denver?”

“The reservation, maybe? There's money up there now with the casino. There's money all up in these hills. Everything from big-time ranchers to Hollywood types looking for quiet.”

“ID'ing the Mexicans might give us a clue.”

“Goddamn,” Bay said. “It just don't make sense. I've known her forty years.”

“Jack knew her longer.”

“You're talking like it's fact,” Bay said. “You ain't proved a damn thing.”

“I know. You're right. So point me in a direction.”

“What kind of direction?”

“Who was Jack close to?”

“Nobody. Jack was a sulker. It's true what Mavis said—he went everywhere alone.”

“All right, what about Mavis?”

Bay thought it over.

“Clara, that gal working in the shop. They say Mavis is like a mother to her.”

“I'll go have a word,” Raney said. “One other thing.”

“What's that?”

“Keep Junior posted outside the house. In a big shiny squad car.”

“Junior? The kid's half narcoleptic.”

“Rotate him, then.”

“I don't have anyone to rotate him with,” Bay said. “You worried Mavis might run?”

“I'm more worried about who might come looking. Somebody got double-crossed.”

Bay shook his head.

“Shit,” he said. “This is the day the lord hath made. He can have a do-over if he wants it.”

“Just the one?”

Bay sniggered.

“Where've they got you bunking?”

“Hotel on Main.”

“That old brothel? The county spares no expense. They shoulda put you up at the casino. All you can eat, breakfast through dinner.”

Bay pointed to an adobe castle near the top of the foothills. Raney wondered how he'd missed it.

He drove a winding descent toward town. It was July, nearing 7:00 p.m., the sun sharper here than it would be at noon back East. He spotted a clutch of mule deer grazing in a paddock alongside a lone Appaloosa. Bay had called the area a desert, but it wasn't the type of desert you saw in the movies: it wasn't deserted, wasn't desolate. Birds didn't drop from the sky, dead of heatstroke. There were mountains and trees and a dozen types of grass. The world changed with every jump in altitude. It sometimes rained in the spring, and in the winter it snowed often. Death was everywhere. Raney never went for a hike without coming across bones, skulls, now and again a full skeleton, rarely a fresh kill. But death here seemed governed by natural law. What happened in that bunker belonged to another place. It was urban, something from what Bay had called Raney's past life, something that would have made sense in the basement of a Lower East Side tenement but here was out of joint, a reminder that men fail to act naturally no matter the setting.

R
aney stood outside a shabby ring, tugging at the skirt, watching one of Dunham's stable pummel a three-hundred-pound Italian kid from Bay Ridge. Timed rounds, no referee. Fifty dollars to fight, a thousand back if you won. Now and again a seasoned street punk might land a shot worth mentioning, but Dunham's boys were topflight amateurs. One even made alternate at the Olympics.

Dunham himself sat perched on a stool at the far side of the ring, suede jacket hanging to his thighs, a thick gel holding every hair in place. He was tall, angular—a gaunt face on a muscular body. The sports pages would have called him wiry. According to an informant, the show went some way toward assuaging the grief Dunham felt when his own boxing career ended with a bullet to the right forearm and a three-year stint at Rikers.

In his deposition, the informant claimed that Roy Meno—dealer, extortionist, racketeer, murderer, and Dunham's uncle by marriage—wanted Dunham dead. Dunham was a liability, likely to start a war because he couldn't keep his hands off someone's girl or because he woke up mad at the sun. That and he talked too much. Not about business: he was just the type who couldn't stay conscious without running his mouth. So Meno isolated him, gave him a bar to manage on Staten Island, far from the hub. And to hedge his bets, the CI said, Meno sent Dunham out on any job likely to get him killed. It was playing with house money. If Dunham didn't come back, so much the better. Until then, Meno made the most of Dunham's skill set. Rival dealers were turning up dead across the five boroughs; the extorted were paying on time.

“If I was you all,” the informant said, “I wouldn't worry about Dunham. It's like the chemical that makes fear was sucked from his brain. Meno's right: sooner or later, he'll take care of himself.”

Meanwhile, Dunham was chafing on the other side of the Verrazano. Word was he needed someone to talk to, someone to laugh at his jokes and generally ease the pain of exile. Raney was young enough to play lackey, able enough to keep pace. So when his lieutenant, who felt about Raney much as Meno felt about Dunham, learned that his junior detective was a three-time Golden Glover, he saw an opportunity. Raney agreed. It sounded like a quick path out of the buy-busts that kept the same faces rotating through the squad's holding cell.

The fat kid from Bay Ridge made it to the third round, in part because his opponent—Manny “the Cobra” Martinez, a moniker that didn't hold up if you considered the fighter's squat, snub-nosed physique—was too short to hit him in the face, and in part because the kid, who hadn't put a mark on Manny, knew how to guard his midsection. When the bell sounded for the fourth, Manny came out looking fed up. He ducked a slow-motion right, then beat on the kid's spleen until he buckled and fell. It took four men to haul him away. Manny pranced around the ring. The crowd jeered: the house would only cover bets
against
its fighters.

Raney was up. He climbed into the ring, pulled off his T-shirt, heard the crowd buzz, saw people rush to place their bets. The emcee announced him as Mike Dixon.

“And who will challenge the challenger?”

A fighter called Spike jumped the ropes. He had three inches and twenty pounds on Raney. Powerful upper body, stick legs, soft middle. A spiderweb tattoo circling his neck.

A fellow undercover shouted up to Raney:

“Don't get caught with anything stupid.”

The kind of advice a mother might give. Still, it was sound. Raney hadn't been hit with a bare fist since junior high.

“Remember, gentlemen,” the emcee said. “No kicking.”

For this play with Dunham to work, Raney couldn't just put his opponent down: he had to humiliate him, make him look as threatening as a middle-aged man staring out the window of a commuter train. “I want blood,” Lieutenant Hutchinson said. “Make his eyes look like two rainbow-colored water blisters. That's how you get Dunham's attention.”

He held back early, bobbing and weaving, sizing up Spike's defense: straight as a board, hands by his sides. Raney danced, jabbed, ducked. Midway through the round he launched two quick lefts just above the belt line. The second landed clean. Spike gave him a sad, man-child look, then stepped hard on Raney's lead foot and knocked him off center with a looping blow to the chest. Raney teetered into the ropes. Spike charged. Raney sidestepped, connected with a straight jab that nearly sent Spike bolting into the crowd. Spike found his footing, spun back around. Raney went to work, staggering the bigger man with a bull's-eye uppercut, blackening his right eye with a four-punch combination. End of round 1.

“Nice, kid,” the undercover called. “Keep working the body.”

Raney charged back out at the bell, swung hard and missed, swung and missed again. Round-2 Spike was light on his toes, held his hands high: a resurrection of the fighter he'd been before Dunham's off-book brawls turned him sloppy. He countered Raney with a left cross to the temple. Raney backpedaled, shook it off. Spike smiled.

“Come on, kid. Get after him.”

Spike was boxing now, measuring distance with his jab, moving his head from side to side.

Take what he gives you, Raney thought.

Spike came at him with a body-head combination. Raney picked the shots off, moved inside, doubled Spike up with a hook to the liver. The big man dropped to his knees, spit blood on the canvas. Raney hovered, taunting him, demanding that he get up. He waited for the ten count, then realized it wasn't coming.

“He's not down,” the undercover shouted. “He's not down!”

Raney heard, but too late. Spike caught him with a roundhouse flush to the hip. Raney stumbled, felt his right leg go dead. Spike made it to his feet. The bell rang.

Round 3:

Spike's right eye was swollen shut, his teeth dripping blood. Raney dragged his right leg behind him, waved his opponent forward, daring him to stand toe-to-toe. Spike obliged. Raney dodged a sweeping left, tagged Spike's good eye, splintered his cheekbone with a double right cross. Spike toppled, his feet twitching on the canvas. No round 4.

The gamblers collected their money. Raney wrapped a handkerchief around the knuckles of his right hand, watched the fabric swell with blood. The ring girl—Dunham's cousin, a well-proportioned blonde who had done time for solicitation—climbed onto the canvas and passed Raney an envelope.

“Nice job, babe,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. The undercover hooted.

Dunham's boys regained their swagger in the final two fights—one a first-round KO, the other a slow meting out of punishment that had Dunham off his stool for the first time all night.

“That's right,” he shouted. “Give the janitor some fucking work.”

Raney lingered by the door, waiting for the crowd to clear. The fighters queued up. Dunham doled out wads of cash without counting the bills. Spike was absent, lying on an ICU gurney somewhere, spinning a tale about the punks who jumped him. It was the Cobra who spotted Raney.

“You got a lucky draw, kid,” he said.

“Maybe,” Raney said.

“No maybe about it. Come back next week and ask for Cobra.”

“I'll do that.”

“It'll be the biggest fucking mistake you ever made.”

“Why wait?” Raney said. “We got the ring right there.”

Dunham guffawed.

“Tough guy,” Cobra said.

He was backing down. Dunham smelled it, too.

“Hey, Cobra,” he said. “It took you four rounds to get rid of the Pillsbury fucking Doughboy. Why don't you crawl back to whatever crab-infested snatch you're screwing this week and have her rub ointments on your boo-boos? And make sure your balls drop before I see you again.”

Cobra scanned the room for any dignity he might salvage, then turned and skulked off. Dunham looked hard at Raney.

“What's up, kid? The envelope short?”

“No, sir,” Raney said.

“Sir? The kid's old school. What's your name again?”

“Mike Dixon.”

“Deadly Dixon. I like it. Deadly Dixon with the mean right cross. You should use that. What can I do you for, Deadly?”

“I was hoping we could talk.”

“So talk.”

“In private.”

“You want to give confession? You've come to the wrong guy, Deadly.”

“I've got something to offer.”

“No shit? You don't hear that ten times a day. All right, I'm curious. Fellas, your pockets are full. One of you pat this kid down and then all of you get the fuck out.”

Raney assumed the position while a heavyweight pawed him from shoulders to socks.

“Clean.”

When they were alone, Raney took the envelope from his pocket and held it out to Dunham.

“What's this?”

“I'm giving it back,” Raney said. “And then I want you to give it back to me. As a salary.”

“Salary?”

“I've been out four months. I tried going straight. Dock work. Construction. I drove a gypsy cab for a week. I even bused tables out in Sheepshead Bay. It ain't me.”

“What were you in for?”

“Possession of a firearm. They found my piece but not the kilo taped up under the tire well.”

“Why come to me?” Dunham said. “How do you even know who the fuck I am?”

“Everyone knows who you are.”

“Then everyone knows I work alone.”

“I hear the jobs are getting bigger. I figured you might want some extra muscle.”

“So tonight was an audition?”

“Something like that.”

“Clever. You're a clever boy, Deadly.”

Dunham squared up on his stool.

“I tell you what,” he said. “Hit me. Right here.”

He pounded his chest.

“One shot. If you can knock me off this stool, then we'll talk.”

“Mr. Dunham…”

“It's Joey. One shot. Take it or turn around and walk the fuck out.”

Raney took it. Dunham lay on the floor in a fetal position, laughing and slapping at the concrete. Raney extended a hand. Dunham waved it off, stood, drew a Glock from his waistband and pressed the muzzle to Raney's forehead. Raney held still.

“You and me,” Dunham said.

He stepped back, slid the gun to the center of the ring, slipped out of his suede jacket, folded it over the ropes. He looked like a Greek statue crammed into a wifebeater. Raney moved away, his hands raised.

“I don't want…”

“What? You afraid if you draw blood I'll kill you? How's this? You don't draw blood, I'll kill you.”

Dunham rushed him, caught him with a shoulder to the sternum. Raney landed on his back, gulping air.

“Protect yourself at all times, Deadly. Already I'm disappointed.”

Dunham took up the stool, flung it full force. Raney kicked it away, managed to get to his feet before Dunham charged again. Raney pivoted, caught Dunham with a knee to the chest, grabbed his arm and threw him to the floor. Dunham started to rise. Raney kicked him in the ribs, jumped on his back, wrapped an arm around his throat. Dunham reached behind, found an ear, and pulled. Raney bit back a scream; his grip slackened. An elbow to the jaw sent him spinning.

They stood bent over, gasping, Dunham bleeding from the nose, Raney from the mouth. Dunham's hair jutted out in all directions. There was a long pause before Dunham lunged, swinging wildly, overreaching, grazing Raney's head with his forearm, leaving himself wide open. A long volley to the stomach put Dunham on his knees. He reached out, grabbed Raney's ankles and pulled. Raney landed on his tailbone, felt a seismic pain rocket down his legs. They lay on the floor, sucking in air, each waiting to see if the other would get up.

“Enough,” Dunham said, pressing on his chest, pushing the words out. “You passed the first test.”

Raney sat up, coughed, wiped blood from his mouth.

“What's the second test?”

“Be at my bar Friday night. Eight o'clock.”

“All right.”

“And come heavy.”

He stayed up past sunrise. Sophia stayed up with him, listening, stroking his hair, fretting over his injuries. He told her what he could.

“This is my way in,” he said. “No more glorified street cop.”

“Seems glamorous,” Sophia said. “Wes, let me take you to the ER. Lord knows where you might be bleeding inside.”

“I've had worse,” he said.

“You're being ridiculous.”

“I'm fine.”

“Oh, really?”

She kissed his neck, started to climb on top of him. Her leg brushed his ribs. He yelped, pushed her away. She sat up, mock-pouting, tugging at her T-shirt where it clung to her thighs.

“What, you're not in the mood?”

She pulled the elastic from her ponytail, shook out her hair, twirled a long strand around one finger.

“You're being mean,” Raney said.

“You never took a beating this bad in the amateurs.”

“They weren't allowed to hit me with chairs.”

“So what's next? What's the reward for putting yourself through this?”

“Now I start making cases,” he said. “No more harassing junkies. No more hanging out all night in Port Authority men's rooms, asking anyone who needs a bath if they want to cop. I'm going above the street. And I'll be reporting straight to the DA. In practice, I'll have more power than my desk-jockey lieutenant.”

“Power?” Sophia said. “Listen to you.”

“Your father will be proud.”

“Don't worry so much about my father.”

Raney nodded to the portrait Sophia kept on her dresser of retired captain Ed Ferguson decked out in formal blues.

“People still talk about him,” Raney said.

“I know. No one liked him, but everyone respected him.”

“The Bruno case made him a legend.”