She rang the bell without hesitation, then stopped when she felt the hard sharp gun sight against her ribs.
“That's right,” said Null. “Let's see who answers.”
“It's you.”
“It is. On that score, you rang and I answered. And now you await yet another answer after ringing. Funny. You do ask for it, don't you, Boyd?”
“I didn't. I don't want you. I don't want anything to do with you.”
“But you have me now, and I guess it would be more precise for me to say that I have you.”
“Why don't you just go—disappear. Don't you see Boston has rejected you?”
The door clicked open and Boyd startled stiff. Her eyes glazed over when she saw who opened the door. “Benway.”
Despite the muzzle of Null's gun pressed into her ribs, she drew her Sig Sauer faster than the man at the door could blink, flashed it and spat, “You're under arrest, Lee.”
“Benway,” he croaked dryly.
“William “Bull” Lee,” Boyd snarled. “Pretty cute your Burroughs joke.”
“Who reads anymore?” he said dully.
“Move back, Lee, and let us in.”
“Got a warrant?”
“It's a phone call away. Wanna handle it that way?”
“No,” he sighed, moving away into the high-ceilinged foyer to let them enter. His hair was wild, a frizzy bush of brown and gray. The house was high-ceilinged Edwardian with oriels and a cupola. There were gables and a widow's watch. There was an ornate fixture of sphinxes and gargoyles that lacked a chandelier.
“You're under arrest, Lee.”
“What about me?” asked Null.
“Who's this guy?”
“I'm nobody,” said Null. “But you knew me as Joseph Xavier Null.”
Boyd turned her back on Benway to face Null. “Drop it,” she seethed.
“Ladies first,” Null said, barely above a whisper.
“Don't think so.”
“Shall we shoot together on three? I think I'll drop you before you drop me. Let's find out.”
“You were the fucking patient?” Benway asked, genuinely astonished.
“We'll put them both away, Null. You should just walk. Get out of here. Go bury yourself deep.”
“No, I think I'll stay for the show. Besides, it's your intent to stop me. And I will not be stopped.”
“What do I care? You're a lowlife that preys on low lives. Go to town. Go anywhere. Just go. I don't care.” Despite what she said she couldn't shake the pain in her chest that expanded the more she looked at the emaciated, hollow-cheeked figure in the overcoat and felt fedora hat that shaded his bloodshot eyes. She seemed to become the proxy for his own suspended agony.
Benway was halfway up the stairs before Boyd drew a bead on him with the Sig Sauer. “Stand the fuck still, Lee, or I'll shoot you in the femur.”
“I didn't want to interrupt what you two had going on. Seemed to be developing into something.”
“The only thing that's developing here is a case against you, Lee. Where's the Indian?”
“You mean Lumpy?”
“Filmore Lakeworry.” She squinted. “Does he have your mother? Is she a hostage?”
“She's in Boca, staying with her cousin. I have the place to myself.”
“You and the Indian are going down for the club riots. I do a search, I find lots of sticks gum, don't I?”
Benway slumped. “Have at it, chief. Sure you will. But you got it wrong. I'm the hostage. I'm a prisoner here. Lumpy's a violent fuckwit, a goddamn Ork enforcer. I'm just a lowly conman. Get me on impersonating a physician, violating Commonwealth licensing laws, fraud. Get me on assault with intent, but I'm not behind the riots. That fucker Lakeworry is making me do it all the way. Give me a day or two. I'll serve him up for you. Testify as a witness—the whole nine yards. I am really not your man, so I am willing to be your man.”
“So, I just leave you my card and you communicate with me and we get Lumpy before he hits another club. I just leave you like that, trust you, you psychopathic fuck?”
“Exactly.”
Null had lowered his gun, standing stock still, wheezing slightly out his nostrils, but otherwise frozen.
“You know I'm not going to get much time on what you have to charge me with to date. The gum's not exactly illegal, you know. And when they finally get us—and you and I both know they'll eventually get us—I'll turn at the first given opportunity. Now, you want to solve the case or do I hand it to someone else?”
“I could throw your bony ass into the condos downtown right now and still get the bust. No reason to leave you out on your own.”
“Sure there is. Lumpy will bolt if I'm gone. That man is a stone criminal, more paranoid and OCD than a Jewish granny. We're lucky the dumb fuck is out on a gum run or you'd be in a firefight. He wants to connect with the chickadees down at TT The Bears.”
“So you want CI status.”
“Just like the patient there whatsisface, your guy Null. I want what he had.”
“And do you want it to bring you what it brought me?” Null spoke as if from nowhere, hollow voiced and final.
“Of course not. But there's no one as insane as I am to work on me the way I worked on you, and look what it did. It made you better, brought you out of your catatonic trance. So what if you lack affect and emotional reactivity? You can live and—”
“Respond, Doctor? Is that the word you were looking for? Respond? No, I can't do that little thing. My entire life boils down to an a priori assumption of purpose, logical positivism at its most perverse.”
“Better than what you had before, bunky.”
Null turned to Boyd. “Did you know that he was here? Did you know he was the one who did this to me, Lieutenant Boyd?”
Her head sank along with her stomach, her fingers clenched hard and slick with sweat around the grip of the gun. “Yes, I knew. The gum down at the clubs was more of his neuro-chemical madness.”
“Another glorious failure, I might add,” said Benway, bowing sarcastically.
Null raised up his weapon and Boyd simply clenched hers even tighter. “I ought to kill him,” he announced. “That would be apropos and settle things out.”
“Null, you don't want to—”
“I don't want to do anything—ever. I said I ought to kill him, but I just can't think it through.”
“Of course you can't.” Benway clapped almost laughing. “You can't because there was no evil done here. In a way, you could say my little experimental therapy was a success. A benefit, in fact.”
Null's gun was at condition zero, cocked and ready, a hair's breadth away from exploding open Benway's sunken birdcage chest.
“Don't kill him, Null, otherwise I'll have to kill you. And I don't want to.”
“Guilty, Lieutenant Boyd?”
“Oh, that and more, Mr. Null. But you already know about that.”
“Everybody knows about that, Lieutenant. Not much privacy on the street anymore.”
“You can't kill me, Null, because it doesn't comport with whatever academic moral structure you set up to keep yourself alive. It doesn't fit. You have no desire for anything so sense drives you, and it doesn't make sense to kill me. Not right now, anyway.”
Null let his arm drop. “No, it doesn't make sense at all. You removed all my addictions, all my emotional pain, my need, and set me out on a purpose, wiping out criminal scum that upset whatever moral balance that can stand in this world—the ethical equation—zero out the balance.”
“You whacked out the Family, down to the last man who'll spend the rest of his days at the laughing academy.”
“I did.”
“I should arrest you, Null. I should end you.” Boyd was ready to use her Sig-Sauer and fidgeted with it anxiously against her leg.
“But you won't because you knew it had to be done. Things are better now that it has been done.”
“Took a big bite out of kiddie porn with that, didn't it, Null?” Benway sneered.
“I ended it in this town.”
“For a while you did, anyway, but the point remains—”
Null finished for him. “That what you did to me—
removing my humanity, my emotions, my fears, my yearnings, my empathy, my very ability to feel anything even physically and know it for what it was, was actually a good thing?”
“That's right, Null. Erasing you actually benefited the world. Something from nothing. How cute.”
“So what do we do now?” Boyd drawled with sarcasm. “Have tea?”
Benway cautiously went back downstairs a step at a time. “Excellent idea,” he keened. “What kind do you like?”
In his mother's kitchen, which was laid out as if it were part of an early twentieth century farmhouse, Null and Boyd sat uneasily at a battered metal enameled table while Benway steeped the tea. For all its appearances, the kitchen could have been in a vegan collective household in Jamaica Plain, not an old Edwardian in Arlington, down to colorful prisms hanging in the windows and ancient rainbow decals still visible on dirty panes of glass, Museum of Fine Arts posters stuck on the cracked plaster wall. “Is that magic mushroom tea, we're drinking, Lee—maybe some psychedelic ergot?”
“Lapsang souchong,” he replied, setting the cups down on the table. “We have lemon, cream and sugar.”
“Black,” they said, nearly in unison.
“He can't poison us,” said Null, sipping from his cup. “It's not in his best interest. If he gets you, Boyd, then he gets no deal and remains stuck with Lumpy and me. If he gets me, he gets another mess to clean and again more problems with Lumpy and you. He gets both of us. He gets a double mess to clean and Lumpy.”
Boyd sipped with a frown. “How do we even know that him and the Indian aren't still pals? Maybe they're in collusion and this is one big stall.”
“You'll know for sure in a few minutes since you're both drinking the tea. I'll join you, in fact.” Benway sipped from his greenish brown handle-less cup. “It'll kick in soon, or not.”
“This whole thing stinks.” Boyd scowled, standing. “I'm taking you in, Lee. Don't struggle or I'll hurt you.”
Null grabbed her wrist iron tight. “Think about it, Boyd. Does it look like Benway's happy here? Does it look like he isn't ready to flip?”
Benway fidgeted, setting down his tea. “Truth is, I'll do anything to get rid of that fucking Mic-Mac freak, who up to this minute thinks we're still pals. Just tell me how you want it, Lieutenant, and I'll come across. I need your help like you need mine. Take me in, I'm good—Lumpy bolts, hits Canada, you get a few measly charges against me, I'll say I tried to give up the Indian but you never gave me the chance. Meanwhile, I plead it all down to a couple of years’ probation, community service, maybe a five buck a month fine. Upshot is, though, you get no big collar and my problem gets solved, anyway. So do it.” He extended his wrists. “Cuff me, take me in. I'll give up everything on the gum down to chemical structure and molecular bonding and you can go chase your own behind trying to get the Indian when he's gone and screwed up North.”
“He's right, Boyd. You pretty much get nothing taking him in.”
“It's crazy that you're on his side, Null.”
“It's all crazy and I have no side. Just expediency and efficiency toward the summum bonum.”
“Yeah, and the highest good says I stay at large. But don't worry, Lieutenant. When you pick up Lumpy you can pop me for good measure, whack me around a little to make it look good so he doesn't suspect yet that I'm serving him up like a Christmas turkey. It'll make you feel better.”
“I couldn't feel worse than I do now.”
“But you got no high from my tea, though, right?”
“No, even that was a disappointment.”
“Speaking of disappointments, I think Null should try some of the gum.”
Lumpy was rolling.
In the dingy, rank shadows of T.T. The Bears Place he was crush dancing hard with a recently post-teenaged collegiate babe who was all over the squat, older street criminal—her meta-bad boy phase on meth, which Lumpy had also thoughtfully provided. Meanwhile, his mouth was chock full of gum, and he lolled a large cud of it with his thick tongue bopping sloppily on his heels to the chaotic shrieking of Death Cab For Cutie, which scourged the monitors and big stack speakers to the point of cracking.
He grabbed her and held her close into the pooling sweat of his body against his saturated “Kill ‘em all—Let God Sort ‘em Out” tee shirt. She squirmed, halfway to get away and halfway to get further into it. Lumpy licked her ear and whispered with a grating rasp, “We connecting, you and me. We connecting!”
She followed his body to the rhythm even as he caromed into other dancers, grabbing each one for a few moments with his thick free arm, holding them each for a moment as he danced in short spastic motions, jagged kicks and gyrations, then set them free as they themselves caromed into yet other dancers. Lumpy wailed into the distorted, clashing din, “We connect—we connect!” And with each wail, the girl's heart palpitated with dread and fluttered with increasing anxiety.
Her eyes darted about the dingy, shadowy expanse of the bar, now referred to in the profession as a “toilet,” whereas once-upon-a-time it was a macramé and pottery hippie restaurant and folk club, looking for a clear way out. There was none.
Darkness, distortion, and bodies barred her way.
The girl bolted away from him, anyway, freeing herself from the muscled arc of his arm with a quick knee to the groin and lunging through other dancers into the slouching crowd, knocking cigarettes and drinks this way and that. Lumpy grunted, danced and wailed plaintively, but did not give chase. He planted his feet and screamed it loud enough to make chicken-wired windows shake:
“We fucking connect!”
He didn't find himself bounced out into the street; he didn't get into a semi-professional brawl with the bouncers or the flack-jacketed gel-haired naïf with the earpiece working security. He was swallowed up by the cacophony of Death Cab For Cutie and the boisterous crowd spurring them on to greater depths of atonal debasement. He was ignored, no mass of struggle and violence to attract a nexus of young lockstep college mavericks to witness his recklessness and extremity.
Muscles pumped, veins pulsating and protruding, Lumpy was ready for more. The drug of the gum was rushing through his circulatory system and his brain was flaming red—he could feel it behind swollen eyes. They began to tear.
Neural misfiring into a harsh echo.
Lumpy wanted love, intimacy—some way to breach the barrier of skin, to connect and be joined—
To someone.
To something.
But the night was cold and bitterly damp as was the smoking crowd of twenty-somethings, tweeners and twinks clotting up the entrance to TT's, bleeding out slowly onto Pearl Street, and cutting up. He glared at them, and in a limp, swaggering way, they glared back. Lumpy smiled, his thick palms sweaty, stunted fingers clutching tight in the pockets of his unfashionable boot cut jeans. He spit out the cud of gum which then stuck to the curb.
Lumpy had a knife.
Lumpy was no longer rolling.
Some jock voice volunteered: “The midget Hiawatha wants to party!”
Another adolescent cracking voice volunteered: “Fuck him up!”
Lumpy beamed, eyes wide and gleaming in streetlight. He flashed both middle fingers, turned and walked off down Mass. Ave. He stopped and jerked like a puppet in the damp air as rushing cars and croaking voices swirled about his storm-affected head. He screamed, straightened himself up a short second later and marched down Mass. Ave. with purpose.
He hit Libby's Liquors.
Quietly, and in the full fluorescent lighting amid a bunch of customers, he demanded the money, smiling at the camera in the corner of the ceiling above the cashier, adjusting his shirt for a moment in the convex, anti-theft mirror hung on the opposite side.
The clerk, a sideburn sporting gaunt faced rocker with a dangling unlit cigarette between his lips, pulled a forty-five Ruger revolver out from under the counter. “Not tonight, chief,” he said, pressing the button (also under the counter) that would bring the Cambridge cops toute de suite.
“Too much gun,” Lumpy sighed, clicking his tongue.
“Fuckin' don't move ya little hard-on!”
“For way too, little man.”
“Listen, dwarf, you're fucking done.”
The blue lights flew through the plate glass and there was the lowing siren, moaning down to a toneless bleat.
“There ya go, chief.”
Lumpy held his breath, checked the scene.
The cops just sat there in the front seat, talking, fiddling. Jerking to and fro for a long two seconds, Lumpy stomped and screamed, “Too much gun for too little man!”
The clerk moved backward, his gun arm trembling, but he was too slow.
Lumpy vaulted the counter neatly and gutted the clerk in a single sideways motion with the knife quick across the belly, then crossed back with the hilt and ran it straight up to the sternum. The clerk clucked, then buckled to the ground. Lumpy stood over him for a moment and blinked, then grabbed down and stuck the Ruger in the waistband of his jeans. He savaged the register for cash as well as the skim box that the clerk had been running under the counter shelf by the alarm button. Customers had long minutes ago gravitated to the back of the store in a confused gaggle of fear. He checked himself for blood, found it wasn't too bad on his clothes, then let himself out from behind the counter, trundling toward the rear security door as the small crowd whispered, creaked and shrank away from him into the furthest corner of the store. In a violent motion, he thrust up the flat red fire-alarmed bolt of the door, which set off a loud electric bell, and lurched out into the back alley, walking fast toward Green Street.
As the long, street-light given shadows fell and blended in the street, he slowed down into them.
Two uniformed cops entered the scene at Libby's, guns holstered, lurking.
The older supervisor of the two with the gravid pot belly protruding from his uniform squinting hard under mirrored aviator glasses asked commandingly, “Alright. What the fuck is actually going on here?”