The Exiled by Christopher Charles Read Free Book Online

counselor in junior high who told me my personality type ‘couldn’t be left to its own devices.’ She wanted to bus me to a school for exceptional children. I never knew if that meant gifted or retarded. I paid a kid from the hood to slash her tires. I had him do it with witnesses around so no one could say it was me. She knew, though. She never brought up the exceptional thing again.”
    Dunham switched off the light.
    “Now let’s take a little ride,” he said.
    Back in the main room, he blew kisses to the musicians.
      
    They drove over the Goethals into Jersey.
    “Where we going?” Raney asked.
    “Someone whose name you don’t need to know is venturing into the real estate business. He bought himself a row of crack houses. Brownstones. Nice homes in their day, whenever the fuck that was. This person wants to make them nice again, but he needs certain individuals to vacate first. These individuals are being disagreeable. Our job is to make them agreeable. You got your piece?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Good. We’re talking about rousting some half-dead tweakers, so a couple of fear-of-God shots and a pair of baseball bats oughta do. Normally I’d say go for the kneecaps, but we want them to walk away. Tweaker bones break easy.”
      
    The informant was right: Dunham talked nonstop, talked in overlapping words, as though there were a backlog of sentences stacked vertically in his mind, one sliding off the other. He talked about last week’s fight at the Garden, about his own amateur career, about the warehouse matches, about traffic, about the chemical stench that flooded parts of north Jersey, about his predilection for strippers and the virtues of fucking them in the shower. He shouted over the local jazz station, smoked without dropping a syllable. The constant stream made Raney’s job easy. He didn’t have to spin stories about Dixon’s childhood, didn’t have to account for his bit upstate. He just listened.
    They pulled off the Turnpike, rolled through a low-end suburban neighborhood, came out in a ghetto with crews mixing on every corner.
    “This is our block right here.”
    He cut the music. A corner kid spotted them, put down the paper bag he’d been sucking from, and shouted, “Five-O.” A half dozen runners scattered from in front of a bank of pay phones. Dunham laughed himself to tears.
    “‘They startle easily, but they’ll be back, and in greater numbers,’” he said. “You recognize that? That’s from Star Wars . Goddamn, the little shitheads think I’m a cop.”
    “It’s the threads,” Raney said.
    Dunham tugged at his jacket collar.
    “No narco could afford this.”
    “He could if he was dirty.”
    “You’re saying I look like a dirty cop?”
    “Isn’t that a good thing?”
    “Yeah, I guess so.”
    Dunham slowed the car, pointed to a sagging brownstone near the middle of the street.
    “That’s her.”
    The front door was sitting off its hinges, propped against the frame. The windows were boarded over, the boards tagged with graffiti.
    “So how do we play it?”
    “We’ll go in from around back. Otherwise the corner boys might get curious. These fiends are their bread and butter.”
    He coasted down the alley with the headlights off. Chain-link fencing lined both sides. Trash spilled from one yard to the next: three-legged chairs, rusted bicycle frames, cracked kiddie pools. Nothing of value. Nothing that could be scrapped or traded.
    A pit bull almost impaled itself trying to get at them.
    “What a beauty,” Dunham said. “A damn shame. I’d have her eating from my hand inside of a week.”
    “I’d like to see it.”
    “I’m shit with people, but animals love me. That’s how I know I’m not a sociopath. I never killed any bunnies when I was little.”
    The back of the house looked even worse than the front. An electrical cord ran up to the second floor and through the only window that remained intact. What had once been a porch was now rubble. The fence was