Devils in Exile Read Free Page B

over onto the curb, came out with a badge and a quick handshake. Smelled of Italian food, tomato sauce and oregano. He belched softly into his fist and excused himself. He wanted to know about a guy they had found earlier that morning, unconscious and bleeding a block down the street. Two fingers broken, a fractured wrist, his right thigh sliced open like a Sunday roast. Maven told him that he hadn’t seen anything, and the detective pointed out that a guy cut like that tendsto make noise. Maven shrugged, reminding him of last night’s rain.
    “You a veteran?” asked the detective.
    Maven looked at him, bewildered.
    “It’s the boots,” said the detective.
    Maven noticed the cop eyeing his hands. Looking for cuts, for bruises.
    “Between you, me, and the butcher,” noted the detective, “said victim has a rap sheet this long. Not exactly the innocent-bystander type, know what I mean? The blade he got cut with was his own. I’m thinking maybe he tried to roll the wrong person last night. What do you think?”
    Maven shrugged and had no idea.
    The detective took down Maven’s address and his digits before thanking him and heading home for the evening.
    That was it. Maven played his misshapen tongue against his lower gums, a ruminative habit. Funny how large the tongue feels inside your head. The wound was not much bigger than a nick, but inside Maven’s mouth it felt like a major deformity.
    He stood like that until a passing girl caught his eye. Over an expensive top and a tight skirt, she wore a clinging wrap that detailed rather than concealed her figure. She was hugging it to herself for warmth, her hair flowing behind her like a black satin scarf. She turned at the gate, stepping onto the lot in dagger heels. She didn’t mince in them, but strode sure-footedly with the confidence of a woman used to walking on knives.
    Then Maven recognized her face. Danielle Vetti. In the flesh.
    “Huh,” she said, close enough to speak, looking disappointed. “I bet him a hundy you wouldn’t be here.”
    Her body was like the fulfillment of her high school promise. She moved with assurance, hugging the night to herself as she did her crocheted wrap.
    “Do you talk?” she said.
    “Yeah. Sometimes.”
    She kept a few yards between them, appraising him as shemight an unfamiliar dog. “You were going to kill that guy, weren’t you?”
    Maven tried to shake his head. It wouldn’t move.
    “Is that why you ran off ?”
    Maven did not have an answer for her.
    “He dragged the guy away from here. So you wouldn’t get in trouble. Ruined a two-hundred-dollar shirt. I waited in the car.”
    A breeze came up, cartwheeling a flattened drink cup across the pavement, stirring her hair. She hugged herself a little tighter.
    “Why didn’t you just give them the money?”
    Maven shrugged. “I never even thought about the money.”
    She shook away the hair strands blowing across her face and opened a tiny clip purse. She stepped to Maven, presenting him with a card, blank but for a handwritten phone number.
    “His number, not mine. He wants to meet you.”
    “Meet me?”
    “I think he wants to offer you a job.”
    Maven looked at the numbers on the card again. “A job? But why would he … ?”
    “Want to hire someone he stopped from killing another man in a parking lot in the middle of the night?” She shrugged. “He collects people like you. If you ask me.”
    The alarm chirped on a silver BMW, and she sat inside, starting it up and pulling around to the gate. Maven raised the orange-striped arm, watching her profile for something more, anything—but she pulled out without another glance his way.

R ICKY
    MAVEN CRACKED OPEN HIS SECOND ROCKSTAR ENERGY DRINK AT the 3 a.m. mark, drinking half of it before setting down the tall can behind the lottery machine. He had already restocked magazines and candy, cleaned and refilled the coffee and Slush dispensers. Soon the news carriers would arrive in their open-doored trucks,