They were lovers for a few days that seemed to last weeks or months.
Boyd hoped for years.
Null hoped for moment after moment.
Boyd had dropped herself and what remained standing was something as new and vulnerable as a fresh, green insect nymph. She felt flushed with sickness and renewed with possibility, that played across her mind like candy across the tongue.
Null was hyper-vigilant, electrified with a vital sense of his own energy and force, his strength a palpable sensation of renewal, and he was subsumed by sensation. The breeze, the warmth of the sun on his skin, the voices of passersby, the touch of Boyd's sweat-slicked fingers, the cadence of his own breathing nearly paralyzed him.
She pressed into him close as they walked, which steadied him.
They walked in contact in bright, early spring afternoon sundown Newbury Street, where the shops and the cafes were touted to express what was Boston's finest, a coeval to parts of Fifth Avenue in New York City. They sat at an outside table at an overpriced Eurotrash bistro and had lunch.
Null broke out into a sweat, enjoying his food, taken aback by it.
Boyd could not help but laugh.
He was so gaunt and vulnerable, a walking shambles of a man.
Scars were everywhere visible upon him, everywhere.
Could you describe him as handsome?
Maybe not, but in the cold light of day Boyd could. There was something in him that came out almost violently, if you were on the west coast you might call it “an energy,” on the east coast maybe “chi,” but it was a vital urgency that bordered on passion that may have actually been passion banked like a fire. In Boston you could say “he had a thing.”
Handsome? In that he was compelling, a void of need and a surfeit of undirected emotion, you could say this was a condition beyond the flesh that transformed its aspect.
Yes, to Boyd, he was handsome.
And at that moment, over a table of food in the warm sun and unremitting breeze, he was everything that there was to Boston Police Lieutenant Kay Boyd.
His shadow against the sun blotted out the other shadows.
Her dead husband.
The murdered children.
The wounds laid upon her by criminals.
A knife in her side.
Detox.
She resisted ordering wine.
It was easy as she realized she didn't want the wine in any degree as much as she wanted Null. Null, who actually crackled a raspy laugh at one of her jokes.
Null, who could now laugh. Null who could now be called human.
Null, on fire from within, with a need for every sensation, every possible slaking ease of emotion and who when he looked at Boyd saw only contentment and fulfillment.
This blocked out the shadow of her betrayal, when she led him on to be a CI against The Family while using him to be a decoy against yet another CI. The whole thing had failed and led to the main CI being tortured to death and Null being tortured into something less than human.
Something distorted and wrong.
Something rent and bent into a relentless monster of cold, unemotional retribution—a biased and predetermined justice that found its conclusion in a perpetual sentence of death.
But Null now had been changed yet again.
He was raw emotion, cluttered and obfuscated into the jerky parody of a paramour.
He wanted everything that Boyd could offer him—
everything, even the implicit pain of the connection. And she wanted him. It was as if the vacuum that he had been, now filled the vacuum within her.
Boyd was on the verge of weeping since the advent of Null. She, too, was possessed of raw emotion.
In a thoughtless way, she wanted him to replace all that had been damaged and missing—substitute good experience for bad memory, pleasure for pain, hope for fear.
Null was prepared for a relentless sentence of life.
When she clasped his uncertain hand, he accepted it, and clasped back.
They did as lovers do—practiced as lovers, behaved as lovers.
They held hands strolling in sunshine through the rose path at the Public Garden. They window-shopped the antiques on Charles Street. They ogled the massive representations of world religions at the Sargent Wing of the Boston Public Library in the old McKim building.
They made a lighthearted promenade through the pretty parts of Boston—the ends of Boylston Street and the Back Bay—the long way to Cambridge along the Esplanade.
They bonded at night in Boyd's bed, in her place after sex that whispered like a dream.
And in dreams, Null walked the streets of the South End, shadowed by the old brick rehabs, looking for trouble. Worse yet, he was looking for trouble in fact.
His dream had, in fact, become reality.
Gum chewing Null, gum addicted Null, meth infused Null was looking for trouble.
They saw him limping, the roving street gang, and instantly took him for a mark. He was easy to surround and intimidate. They crushed in on him, hard. To their amusement, at first, he crushed back. It wasn't a difficult calculation to make—five against one. They were going to have some fun before beating the mark to death.
Null sized them up in the brooding shadows of Columbus Avenue amid the rehabs and basement boutiques.
They sized him up, and laughed unanimously.
They were all white young twenty somethings—the usual Boston Irish Jewish Hispano mix from the projects or driven down from Lynn or Dorchester. They had personalities and individual quirks and crochets, charm and even an uneven a kind of charisma. And none of that mattered. As a group, all that was annihilated. As a group, they formed an entity of hungry violence, a wrenching yet frivolous need.
Null limped toward them and faced them, shaking.
He was not calm, nor cold, nor unaffected.
He was sweating and his lips were white and pulled back into a grimace of contempt.
The leader taunted, “Little bitch wants to get by.”
“Little bitch ain't never gettin' by again!”
The leader, tall in a distressed bowler hat, slumped in denim and a torn high school varsity jacket, walked up to Null to push him over, counting on the injured leg to buckle, grinning happily.
But that's not what happened.
Null reared back his head and screamed.
This took the leader aback, stopping him in his tracks, but only for a moment. He regained his composure with a laugh and muttered just loud enough to hear: “Crazy fuck.”
Null screamed again, but in words carefully articulated, defined by rage: “You're absolutely right!”
The bowler-topped leader pushed against Null to knock him backwards and Null instead gutted him like a pig in a single direct motion. He sank to his knees and fell backward.
They barely saw the blur of the knife.
Null screamed again and the remainder of the group tried to break, but they failed.
He descended on them like an eclipse, like fast falling darkness, a shadow of calamity and hatred.
Null was not detached nor machine logical, yet he was electric, connected. And he hooked up and patched in with each of the gang, solely using fists and the blade of his knife.
They fell even faster than Null upon them.
The short one with the red bandana around his neck managed to get up and turned to run, then turned again, squinted his flushed, pimply face and drew down on Null with 38 Ruger semi-automatic, firing too many rounds to miss.
But of course he missed.
Null pulled the Glock nine to respond in kind and blew up his chest and throat.
Sirens and blue lights followed and Null sat down, cross-legged, looking tired.
Two cliché cops, uniforms emerging from a newly detailed patrol car, one young and tall, the other equally tall but paunchy and gray-haired, came for him crouched and determined, police specials drawn. They screamed consecutively and in a round at Null to get down on the ground, even though he was already down on the pavement, sitting cross-legged.
Null spat.
The younger cop shot first—one round from the revolver—but didn't get to shoot again after Null blew his ankles out from under him. The older cop was a better shot and just about nailed him with two rounds, but Null shot him in the throat before he could adjust his aim for a third. Then he got up from where he was sitting reluctantly, smashed their holstered radios, then drove the squad car home, lights off, ditching it in a landfill tilted on a mud pile six blocks away from Boyd's condo.
Breathing hard, shaking and covered with sweat, he made his way awkwardly up the stairs, ignoring the elevator, to Boyd's condo. He entered, locked the door and stripped off his clothes, unburdening himself of every weapon, then went to the bedroom and stood over the sleeping Boyd. He slipped into bed next to her and spooned himself against her hard, trembling.
This was the first of what was to become a nightly routine.
In a contravening compulsion against the need for affectionate bonding, the deep transcendence of the love and romance paradigm that had swept up Null and Boyd both like an irresistible, irrefutable tsunami, it was now an even more paramount imperative that Null violently beat the heads in of anyone he could find once it was assured that the gum was wearing off.
Null was caught up in the violent backlash riot of “The Chaw.”
And even as he thought of the blood suffused knot of the white gang on Columbus Avenue and their tangle of desperate limbs, he allowed himself an easy blanket of pleasure to cover the recollection with a twilight state of numb fatigue. Just before sleep took him, he smiled.
When Benway opened the front door, he was immediately smeared with blood.
He recoiled as Lumpy blundered in and nearly fell over.
“I dumped the gum!” he cried.
“What the fuck?” sputtered Benway.
Lumpy lunged toward the sofa in the den of the ancient house and plopped down on it. He tore off what remained of his shirt and mopped sweat with it. “We fucked up!”
“What do you mean, we?”
“Yeah, while you were drinking tea, I was getting my ass kicked.”
“You're getting blood all over my mother's sofa.”
“Towels!” Lumpy growled. “Get me some fucking towels!”
Benway obliged and Lumpy stuffed them against himself to stanch various wounds. “Drink!” ordered lumpy. His lips bled. “Drink!”
Benway shakily did as he was told, pouring four fingers of cheap whisky into a tumbler from one of his mother's fancy decanters.
Lumpy took it all in a single swallow and panted a bit afterward.
“So, we're fucked,” Benway observed glumly.
“Fucked out of the gum.”
“Time to leave, then, I think.”
“You could be right. But we need to leave with a stake.”
“I got cash reserves—enough to get us to Montreal.”
“No, we need a wedge to get in the game there—the gum.”
I don't have the set-up to make more. And it's only a matter of time before they find us here at my mother's place. The cops and the zombie found us already.
“The fuck you saying?” Lumpy's eyes were wide; his face flush.
Benway explained in the kindest, most palliative, most unrealistic way possible, which Lumpy immediately translated as betrayal.
“You were going to serve me up to that Boyd bitch?!” he cried, lurching toward Benway, who stepped away and flinched. Even wounded and spent, Lumpy was dangerous.
“It was a backup plan. I just needed to stall them while we did what we had to do and blew the hell out of here.”
“You should be dead, Benway, get me?”
“The idea is becoming distressingly clearer over time.”
“It's clearer than you think, Doc. I almost got my own damn clarity tonight.”
“I thought you were coming at them hard, kill shots at the ready. Jesus was on your side and all.”
“I did come in hard, but they were there first, and they came harder. And Jesus, well they didn't have Jesus like me, that's for certain, because I may be shot up but only in two places, just the meat—no bullets stuck in me, praise the lord. But I'm fuckin' benched for a while.”
“They followed you here.”
“Nah. Ones that got closest fell hardest. I got away dirty, but free of those McGoons.”
“You're sure.”
“I know my business, Doc. Malek never hires quality muscle. Too cheap. They're all a bunch of clueless doofuses. I should have killed them all and got our grubstake off them.”
“Why didn't you?”
“Too many, too fast—too damn ready for me. You were right. It was a whack-out waiting to happen. It's a damn Jesus miracle I'm not all shot up all to pieces.”
“Might be due to the flak jacket you were wearing. Praise that.”
“I had to ditch the thing for speed. Fucking McGoons were right on my heels.”
“Listen, Lumpy. The cops know where we are, waiting for me to dime you out. The Ork has pull down at One Schroeder—they got cops on the arm—just how long you think before they get this information? How long before the housepainters come and make a mural out of us?”
“We under some pressure and that's a fact.”
“No, we're already in arrears and about to be foreclosed on. They're all coming and before we can make any good plans to do anything about it. We got to go tonight, no time to recoup! We got to bandage you up and get you strolling.”
Lumpy sat back, released some of the blood-streaked bleached white towels he was dabbing himself with, and pulled down on Benway with an old Colt 45 semi-automatic Combat Commander that he took off one of the muscle of the Ork. “We go when I say so, Doc—or I go alone.” He cocked it, condition zero.
“You're suicidal.”
“Think you not, Doc, with this gun in your face? Right now it's 50/50 whether I use you or blow you away.”
“Back at you,” Benway thought to himself silently, struggling not to hyperventilate.
“Right now, we got use for you.”
“Okay. Great. So lighten the fuck down on that gadget there and clue me in. You're not going to shoot—that'll be yet another problem for you to solve. Right now you got more problems than solutions.”
“You're gonna solve one.”
“And what about you?”
“Ain't it obvious? I need a few days to heal up. Then we blow this popsicle stand for real.”
“You got people in Montreal?”
“No, but I'll get ‘em. People come cheap or ain't you guessed that by now?”
“I'm out,” Benway mastered his breathing.
“You're whatever I say you are.”
“You're not in much of a position to prove that.”
“I think at this angle, if I shot you in the shoulder, there'd still be enough left of you for me to get out of you what I want.
“It's stupid.”
“No, what would be stupid would be if I got up off this couch and started hurting you the way we used to do down at Gary Lee Obidowski's garage.”
Benway caved and slumped into that fact with a wince. “Okay, whatever. What the fuck am I supposed to do while you lie in bed watching Fox News—sell my blood?”
“It ain't worth anything.”
“What then, genius?”
“The cops—that Boyd bitch you told me about—they got the gum off the clubs, right?”
“Yeah. I guess. So?”
“So, that's enough for us to start selling hard in Montreal off the traveling reputation of the Chaw. News is out all over about the gum by now.”
“But the cops got it, and we have no way to get it. We can't take it off the cops.”
“Yeah, we can. I got a way. Think you can whip us up some good drugs. You got enough of a set-up for that?”
“Sure. What do we need?”
“Downers, tranks—something to put someone out—then maybe something hallucinogenic for when he wakes up. That'll do.”
“For when who wakes up?”
“You'll see.” Lumpy yawned, settling back and dabbing at himself again with more bloody towels. “Now, go get me some more of your mom's shitty whisky!”
“Don't tell me it was you,” Boyd pleaded over coffee at a little brioche shop off Clarendon Street in the South End.
Null's hands shook, mishandling his cup of espresso.
“I don't want to lie to you.”
“How does it feel to want?”
“I cherish it.”
“Then tell me.”
“I think it's failing me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The gum, the drug, it's a wash. The limbic system, the amygdaloid nucleus—they're crapping out on me.”
“So you did it.”
“I had to do it.” He leaned into her, ferocity in his eyes, his lips drawn taut.
“I don't get it. You did them all? Every one of them the past few nights. How many deaths?”
“I didn't count.”
“You're a mass murderer.” She dropped her coffee and the cup shattered. The cashier hustled over to help clean up the mess, but Boyd grabbed his stack of napkins and waved him off.
“Even now it's true, what I told you before. I really only do one thing. Just one thing.”
“No! It's no longer true! That was different. You're different now and you don't have to do these things.”
Null was resolute, intense, yet somehow resigned with a hollow laxity in his voice. “Now more than ever I have to do them. And that's the change. Before, when I did them, I did them for expediency, for necessity, for a kind of justice. Now, I do them like an addict, desire and need combined. I'm compelled to do them not by any outside requirement, but from inner urge. Out of selfishness, not out of situational construct, the only necessity now being these new, raw feelings. I do them for myself—a self I don't understand that must do these things to avoid unbearable pain. But up till now, I never did them out of pain at all but only as a consequence of pain. The effacement of pain is what caused it all then and ironically, is what causes it now. Only then it was the solution and now it's the problem. There's only one way I know to solve this problem.”
“No!” cried Boyd. “No, that doesn't work at all.”
Getting up briefly to toss away the coffee garbage, then sitting down again, Boyd started sobbing. Null just sat there, tense and waiting.
When she was finished, she looked up at him with watery eyes and said, “I should arrest you.”
“You should probably just shoot me here and now. Get it done. I'm fucked as it is.”
“Don't say that. You need a hospital, tests, some kind of anti-toxin.”
“I need a bullet in the brain.”
“Don't make that be the only answer.”
“I can't make up the answers any more than I can make up the questions.”
Boyd sprang up again, stepped over to Null's side of the table, and dragged him up from his seat. He didn't resist.
She embraced him, breathed into his ear. “Just be with me, Null. Just be with me as long as you can.”
“I want nothing but that, nothing but that and an end to the night terrors.”
“Night terrors? Is that what you call them? Is that all they are?”
Null grabbed her back abruptly and pulled her into him. He kissed her hard and deep and then said in a raspy half whisper, “What else would they be?”
Yonah Shimmel, senior forensic specialist for the Boston Police Department, was indulging his vice for comic books at the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square. He had scored several graphic novels, some underground porn comic books called Horny Biker Sluts, and a few crucial issues of the X-Men for his collection. Weedy, slight and small with a woolen yarmulke bobby pinned to his baby fine hair, his posture formed a small “s” when he walked. He never made it to the parking garage on Garden Street. Benway, his rented panel van parked awkwardly by a Thai restaurant, stabbed him hard in the neck with a syringe of fast acting solution of Dilaudid and plunged it down sweatily. He made a scene of struggle and grunting, dragging Shimmel off to the back of the van, but these incidents went mostly ignored in Harvard Square and were reported slowly when reported at all.
All along the way back to Arlington, Benway plotted the demise of Lumpy to offset the terrific fright of kidnapping a police official, trussing him up in the basement of his aunt's house in Arlington and drugging him out of his mind. He drove with nervous slowness all the way back, stopping short one time too many. “Another Jesus miracle,” he said to himself, parking the van by backing into the driveway so the hatch would face the basement bulkhead.
It was a bad lug for Benway to carry the slight frame of Yonah Shimmel to the basement through the filthy bulkhead, down crumbling steps.
Even worse, it was a long, awkward process to strap the flopping, unconscious body of Yonah Shimmel to a hastily constructed pivot board with Humane Restraints, and Benway kept getting hit in the face by a wayward arm and kicked by an aimless leg. He would have laughed uproariously if he were outside himself watching, but he wasn't. He cursed and grunted and found none of it funny.
Getting a line in for the IV was also a bit of a struggle. He had to hang it just right, adjust the drip, make sure drugs, lactate of Ringers and fluids were all routed in. He was also clumsy with the needle, going through two of them before getting it right.
The black, mossy clumps covering an approximate hundred years of neglected tools and shop equipment made him filthy and clung thick to his sweat. He couldn't get out to the fan fast enough.
Shimmel was groggily waking up, but Benway wasn't concerned. The kid was so whacked out on custom acid and ergot concoctions, with a little mescaline mixed in, he wouldn't be sure if he was alive or whether death was either dream or reality. He drooled a bit from his mouth and his head lolled. Benway took pains to strap down his skull against a headboard, wet his mouth down with a clean rag soaked in fresh water, then went out clumsily up crumbling steps, securing the bulkhead behind him.
Benway stowed the Dodge Econoline white panel van at the far end of the driveway in front of the ancient free-standing garage and hoofed it back to his mother's house, still in the name of Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon, off Mass. Ave. where Lumpy was recuperating in the gambrel attic room
Lumpy lay naked in bed on his back, cruising his iPhone for porn.
“You fuck it up?” he mumbled.
Benway was resigned, craven. “I think I did it right. He's in the land of Oz with the munchkins in my aunt's house basement.”
“You hooked him up?”
“But good. He doesn't even know if he's conscious or not.”
“He could be a cop then.”
“That Boyd bitch is on top of it, though. You contact the cops the way you say, and she'll be on both our asses in a day or two.”
“We just need the gum, then we blow.”
“You need stitches and antibiotics first.”
“I know, Doc, nothing you can't handle, though. Right?”
“Right.”
“We contact the cops anonymously, do the meet and drop, then send them their boy back in the Econoline. They'll waste days tracking down the origins of that beast to some dead men in lockup that know squat.” Lumpy shifted positions, hissing with pain.
“This plan is whacked, Lumpy. We should be on the move now.”
“The cops are clueless and slow. I'll text 'em from my deadman's phone and they won't come swarming here—not unless you tell that Boyd, which you wouldn't do, right?”
It was a thought, and it appealed to Benway. He'd have to work it just right to escape intact. “Right,” he echoed.
“You need to get the goods to sew me up and dose me up, Doc, unless you want me to go bleeding into this mattress all night.”
Benway was beginning to feel hopeful. “You know, Lumpy? Maybe there's a clean way out of this thing after all.”
“Of course there is, Doc. Jesus Christ and Joel Osteen both gave me the lowdown.”
“I see.”
“And get me some pain pills too, while you're at it. I hurt like a little bitch!”