“God has a funny way of giving back to you what you lost most.”
“Deal with it, Filmore. God is a shadow puppet, a prop for politics and war, but really there's only the chaos we spend our lives ducking. The randomness hits you to no point and purpose, but we whine about a complicated master plan getting knocked off as we go sucking up to the imaginary God to get a better deal.”
“No, bro, he real. Love and acceptance and money are zeroing right in on us as if God had always wanted us to have it. Joel Osteen said it on the cable.”
“You're a meatball enforcer on the run and I'm an uncredited phony baloney scientific genius with a target on my back for a mook like you.”
“No, no, Benway. You honest and true goddamn genius. You got gum that takes down the barriers to human sensitivity, to individual resistance.”
“Where's the money, Lumpy? Just when is payday so I can take the Montreal Express outta butts town good and proper?”
“It comin', Benway, you just gotta have faith. God is on our side.”
“Which means we can kill anyone who gets in our way with good conscience?”
“Yeah, man. We'll feel bad about it, but not that bad.”
“I'm gonna be sick.”
“You watch out, Benway. Kids are there.”
“I don't care.”
“Here, I help you care.” With a hard-coiled thrust of his bandy left leg, Lumpy knocked Benway off the polyethylene-studded rock face of the practice wall of the Stalag-Tight rock gym in Somerville.
Benway swung helplessly from his lifeline against the semi-pliant candy colored rock forms of the plastic practice wall looking a nacreous green while Lumpy guffawed as if he had a large cud of the special gum in his mouth, but it was only his thick tongue.
“You a pussy, Doctor.”
“I know it. Why I have you!” he sobbed dryly, trying and failing to regain the composure he never truly had as he bounced almost playfully off the face of polyethylene rock wall.
One of the trainers assisted him down with pulleys and carabineer clips; Lumpy chuckled, guffawed, chortled, and snorted every inch of the way down. Benway kicked his legs like an upended insect, limp and trembling. Lumpy looked like he was having a seizure, his face wet with clabber and his wide, flat fetal alcohol syndrome nose turning rose red with effort. He went down only a fraction faster than Benway and pushed away the trainer when the soles of his blue Jordans touched the instep of Benway's blue Crocs at the bottom. The trainer shot a glance at Lumpy, which he shot back all the harder with a pinched little grunt that cut the trainer's intended invective off at the first syllable. Benway cringed, still entwined in safety line, but Lumpy grabbed him, shook him straight. All around them swinging cables, climbing bodies, the shadows cast by the jutting shapes of the rock wall under vacillating fluorescent lights added a sort of cheap science fiction aura to the air. It was movie-like—a ghostly fantasy of something badly imagined.
“We partners, doc. Ain't nothin' gonna stop that but death, and I am gonna make sure we both stay alive. Keep you alive and safe, Doc, believe me.” Though his chin and lips were wet, he delivered these words with a heavy seriousness, as if each word were itself a weight. “You don't worry about Ork goons, Doc. They ain't nothin' to me.”
Benway brushed him off weakly, but Lumpy acted as if there was some force behind it.
“We're dead meat.”
“We were that at the 1270, so them torpedoes thought, but we here now and they a bunch of goo in the I-C-U.”
“You know what borrowed time is, Lumpy?”
“Filmore. Not Fill, not Lumpy, not Heap. And I like stolen time better.”
“It's not ours.”
“Whatever we take is ours.”
“They're coming to take it back.”
“My Mic-Mac ass they will. Look, Doc, every crew gets tired of dyin' off without a profit. We keep killin', they beat a retreat to something not so expensive as fighting for a drug they think don't work, anyways.”
“But it does work—sort of.”
“No, man. It work all the fucking way. Even with all that head-crack-backlash, this gum drug got street cred now. Got a big, bad reputation. Too dangerous to use, too hard to get. Nobody know where to get.”
Benway clicked. “Therefore, too irresistible to refuse. The hip club kids will want it all the time.”
“Beautiful and dangerous, but cheap, like playmate of the year gone crack whore.”
“Thrill you and kill you. So these fucking club debacles are like an underground promotion.”
“What you mean?”
Benway wiped his crusty lips with his sleeve, his murky gray eyes squinting behind tri-focal glasses. “What they call guerilla marketing.”
Lumpy was snorting with suppressed impatience. “What the fuck?”
“The shit's gone viral!” he shouted, grabbing Lumpy by freakishly wide shoulders that felt to his spatulate fingers like outsized knots of wood. Stalag-Tight rock gym patron's and their children's heads both turned toward them and the echoing din of the gym toned down.
They had an audience.
Benway dismissively waved it away.
Lumpy put it together: “On the money! Up the desire—”
“Up the price!”
“We turn that shit over quick soon.”
“You don't do much on the computer, but videos of the club brouhahas are all over the Internet, the social networking and sharing sites. Facebook, Instagram, Reddit.”
Lumpy blinked. “I don't get all that fidgety-widgety stuff online, but I'm savvy to the computer. I watch videos on the You-Tube for sports, maybe NudeVista for naked celebrities.”
“It's everywhere; Google it. They call it “The Boston Beatdown.”
“I got a smartphone—don't use it much. Like my flip better.”
“You know they can track those phones with GPS, genius?”
“Sure they can. I watch TV. Dead men's phones. Let ‘em track away. They won't even know who they're looking for.”
Benway spat back: “Fuck the phones. How do we distribute?”
“You the genius, Doc. You don't see it?”
Benway just stood there, craning his neck to the side.
“We give all the low-level gangs like Gangsta Boyz a cheap deal they flock to. We let it out we got the drug what makes you mad sexy rampage-y—club riot death like on the news. Monster cray-cray, but just like ex, all connected and shit. They scream for it.”
“It makes an odd kind of reverse sense. I suppose I'm still in.”
“You in, anyways, Doc, or I kill your ass, pure and simple.”
Standing a head and a half taller than the Mic-Mac Indian, even with his weedy frame in a slouch, his stomach out, his back sloped, Benway nonetheless looked sunken and small. He rubbed the bristling stubble of his angular chin and muttered, somehow loudly, “Did I ever tell you about a man called Null?”
Though he hadn't wanted it inasmuch as he could have plausibly wanted anything at all, even as an academic concept, Null was a great success. A success of enmity. He had made ephemeral paranoia flesh without suffering a twitch of that disorder himself: The muscle of the Ork was out to get him; the cops had him in the system with Identikit sketches of him on every patrol car screen in Greater Boston; Detective Nick Andromeda was bribed and primed and out for his blood and Malek the Mallet wanted him splayed out on a four-point restraint table at Gary Lee Obidowski's garage for a long, sustained session of questioning.
The only ones not directly out to get him were the Gangsta Boyz, who weren't exactly sure if that seven thirty motherfucker wasn't too off the chain to cap or if indeed he was running their whole crew from the outside.
They were all making plans to trap him, triangulate him, get him in their collective sights, and execute him, preferably with a helpful serving of overkill. The essential problem was one they just couldn't recognize or accept: How do you trap a man, lure him to his death if he doesn't want anything, has no goal you can identify? How can you attract a stone? Maybe a magnet if there's iron in it, but what if the iron is all used up—gone? And there was no irony in Null. None. If you don't know what a man wants, or even if he wants, then how can you determine what he needs?
And need was the quotient, the sum, the fulcrum upon which to leverage Null into the proper kill zone.
But so far, no one could determine exactly what the son of a bitch needed that he didn't already have or couldn't get without the lure.
Despite the demanding difficulty of this proposition, all Null's predatory antagonists were deeply distracted by other issues and considerations, practicalities, expediencies, by their own needs—overloaded by them in fact—while Null in his brutally simplified pragmatic approach to slicing through Gordian knots rather than untangling them, was not. He could not be distracted, though his focus was lax and un-driven. He could not want, pine, desperately seek, even though his impetus was pure and clear and final. No, as he would tell them, could they but ask, Null only did one thing, just one thing.
That one thing was the only thing beyond eating and sleeping. It was what brought him from point A to point B and straight through to C.
So far in his new history of death, Null did not fail at that one thing—had yet to fail—and by all accounts, few as they were, simply could not fail.
In the undercurrents of rumor that made up the word on the street, this much was the clear consensus belief from the streetwalker to the leg-breaker and even to the housepainter:
He could not be stopped.
This meant Null had inadvertently become very adept at yet another thing.
Fear.
For those who knew most about him down to those who knew the least, especially the police, Null inspired fear.
Fear of that which should not happen, couldn't really happen, wasn't really known to happen, but what if it did?
What if it did happen in that heart-stopping moment of the impossible revealed before widened, transfixed eyes? Housepainters roamed the streets of Boston looking for him, rousting homeless winos and shooting gallery junkies just for him, hunting him down in a sweat. The question now was a new tattoo of the mind:
What if it did happen?
What if he could not be stopped?
What if, while you were coming for him, he was coming for you?
These thoughts all ran through the mind of newly made Detective First Grade Nick Andromeda as Null's forearm creased his windpipe, bending him over backward onto the lip of the central fountain in the sunken granite and marble courtyard of 50 Rowes Wharf on the waterfront by the North End. His grunts and panting echoed below the arched portcullis while Null was almost soundless but for a little wheeze escaping his flared nostrils.
Null right-handed him across the jaw, dragged him up and kneed him in the belly, let him sink to his knees, coughing.
“Where are your friends, Nick? Why aren't they chipping in? Something you said, maybe?”
“How did you know?” Andromeda slobbered.
“The muscle of the Ork taught me they twitch under pressure.”
“C-cluster-f-fuck!” Andromeda stammered out.
Null jackhammer punched him in the face, holding him up.
“Not really. Neat as you please, Nick. Nothing sloppy here but you.”
“Temporary condition, fucknuts!” Panting and wheezing.
“Life is temporary, Nick. Want me to show you?”
“Do your worst, prick.”
“If I could laugh, I would laugh at that, but I really can't. And you can't even see why that's funny.”
Andromeda lunged.
Another quick, hard knee to the xyphoid process. Null pulled the lapels of Andromeda's overcoat down to the elbows, imprisoning his arms. He took Andromeda's piece neatly from the shoulder holster.
“Can't have enough nice guns in this town, can we?”
“They're coming for you, you twat!” Andromeda coughed out, “So why don't you blow?”
Null kicked him down to the marble floor, calm as a bank auditor.
“No one's coming, Nick. We made other plans. In case you don't know, in this town, buying off muscle is easy, especially when you got a cocked Glock held to the crotch.”
With his Glock set hard to Andromeda's chest, Null knelt down, and neatly, without ceremony, broke his right index finger. Against training and the conditioning of unremitting Boston streets, the detective howled.
“Now it's time for a little Q&A, Nick. Tell me, which one is getting the closest to me?”
Andromeda spat at him and Null clocked him in the face with the muzzle of the gun.
“Answer me, Nick, or I start putting holes in you. Maiming and killing cops is not in my best interest, but at this stage of the game, I think I can risk it.”
He started with the detective's left foot and the report echoed loud and menacing amid the marble and granite of the rat-scarred stone landscape. Andromeda screamed.
“Don't make me ask again.”
Andromeda caught his breath, rivulets of sweat and tears streaming down his now contorted face.
“I am, you fuck!”
Null shot him again, this time higher up the leg. He had to shake the detective at the shoulders to get him to compose himself afterwards. Then he set the muzzle of the gun hard up against Andromeda's left eye and cocked it. He didn't have to ask again.
“Boyd!” Andromeda screamed into overlapping echoes, the slopping sounds of the brackish bay against the rocks. “Lieutenant Kay fucking Boyd!”
Null sounded almost gentle as he picked Andromeda up from the stone floor of the courtyard and set him floppily onto the lip of the now dry fountain. He spoke in an airy tone barely above a whisper: “And before I drop you off at the E-room, you're going to hand me back my quarter pound of gak. It would simply be bad business to let it get around that you took that off of me and I might have to make some messy symbolic public kills to make up for it.”
“You're fucked, zombie,” Andromeda gasped. “You just don't know it yet!”
“Oh, I know it, Nick. We all are. And in time, we'll all be leveled at six foot deep. But then again, I would think this ‘you're fucked’ warning kind of funny coming from a cop on the arm with two bullet holes in his leg and a broken trigger finger.”
Andromeda slumped over and vomited.
“We'd better get you down to Mass General before serious complications set in. I don't think it would be a good idea to have to start over with whatever hotshot replacement they have for you waiting in the wings.”
Null wiped his mouth, chin and the front of his coat with a handkerchief and helped him up to his one good leg, maneuvering him up to Atlantic Avenue across wide shallow steps.
“I'm not on the arm, zombie fuck!”
“Of course you are, Nick. Every low-life in town except your cop buddies knows that Malek the Mallet put the hit out on me, and you're the hitter.”
“Fuck yourself, Null.”
“No need to when they're all lining up to do exactly that for me. But I wonder how surprised they'll all be when they get that big O that's coming. Should be something.”
Before Andromeda could reply, Null threw him in the back of a sky blue, ancient Ford Escort waiting for them, lights flashing, and obstructing traffic somewhat along the narrow, congested contortion and twist of bleakly filthy urban construction reno-scape that was Atlantic Avenue. Andromeda groaned an unheard retort and Null peeled off toward Staniford Street to get to Mass General Hospital.