Verwandte Artikel zu Devils in Exile: A Novel

Devils in Exile: A Novel - Softcover

Hogan, Chuck

 
9781451633399: Devils in Exile: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451633394 ISBN 13: 9781451633399
Verlag: Pocket Star, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Neal Maven comes home from his tour in Iraq to nothing—no job, no friends, no future. Then he meets Brad Royce, a fellow vet, charismatic and confident, with the lifestyle and the one woman Neal has always wanted: Danielle Vetti, Maven’s high-school dream girl. Royce offers Maven a spot on his team of vets who intercept major drug deals, take the dirty money, and destroy the product—an adrenaline-charged, get-rich scheme with a clear moral imperative. But is it too good to be true? With two psychotic hit men out for retaliation, a relentless DEA agent closing in, and more questions than answers about Royce, Maven suddenly finds he’s in too deep—and the truth may be his worst enemy.

Delivering “heart-stopping intensity” (San Francisco Chronicle) in all of his novels of suspense, Chuck Hogan nails a terrifying criminal underworld of lethal violence and complex friendships, loves, and rivalries in Devils in Exile.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chuck Hogan is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Devils in Exile and The Killing Moon.  The Town was awarded the Hammett Prize for excellence in crime writing, and named one of the ten best novels of the year by Stephen King.  He is also the co-author, with Guillermo del Toro, of the international bestseller The Strain.  He lives with his family outside Boston.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE LOT

A COLD SATURDAY NIGHT IN NOVEMBER.

Neal Maven stood on the edge of the parking lot, looking up at the buildings of downtown Boston. He was wondering about the lights left shining in the windows of the top-floor offices—who does that, and why—when a thumping bass line made him turn.

A silver limousine eased around the corner. Its long side windows were mirrored so that the less fortunate could see themselves watching the American dream pass them by. Maven stuffed his hands deep inside the pouch pockets of his blanket-thick hoodie, stamping his boots on the blacktop to keep warm.

Nine months now. Nine months he’d been back. Nine months since demobilization and discharge, like nine months of gestation, waiting to be reborn back into the peacetime world. Nine months of transition and nothing going right.

He had already pissed through most of his duty pay. The things you tell the other guys you’re going to do once you get back home—grow a beard, drink all night, sleep all day—those things he had done. Those goals he had achieved. The things the army recommends doing before discharge, to ease your transition—preparing a résumé, lining up housing, securing employment—those things he had let slide.

A lot of businesses still stuck yellow SUPPORT OUR TROOPS ribbons in their front windows, but when you actually showed up fresh from Iraq, looking for work, scratching your name and address on an application pad, they saw not a battle-tested hero but a potential Travis Bickle. Hiring a guy with more confirmed kills than college credits was a tough sell. Maven could feel civilians’ discomfort around him, their unease. As if they heard a tick, tick, tick going inside his head. Probably the same one he heard.

Barroom conversations took on subtext.

“Let me buy you a drink, soldier” meant If you wig out and decide to start shooting up the room, spare me, I’m one of the good guys.

“You know, I came close to enlisting myself” meant Yeah, September eleventh made me piss my pants, but I somehow pulled myself together and haven’t missed an episode of American Idol since.

“I supported you boys one hundred percent” meant Just because I have a ribbon magnet on my car doesn’t mean you can look at my daughter.

“Great to have you back” meant Now please go away again.

He finally did drop by the VA for some career guidance, and a short-armed woman with a shrub of salt-and-pepper hair and everyday compassion sat down and banged out that magical résumé, omitting any reference to combat experience. What he considered to be his proudest accomplishment in life, aside from not getting maimed or killed in action—namely, passing the six-phase Qualification Course at Fort Bragg, earning his Special Forces tab in the run-up to the Iraq invasion—was shrunken to a bullet point on the “Skill Sets” section of his résumé. “Proficient at team-building and leadership skills.” Not “Mud-hungry, man-killing son of a bitch.” So much of his life since coming back had been about writing off what had happened.

The resulting document was a skimpy little thing that whim pered, “Please hire me.” He had fifty of them printed on twenty-four-pound paper at Kinko’s and seeded another seventy-five around the city via e-mail, to a great and profound silence.

The parking-lot-guard job—6 p.m. to 2 a.m., three nights a week—came via a posting on craigslist. The owner of the parking lot was a builder looking to jab another diamond pin in the cushion of downtown Boston. The property manager who hired Maven, a square-shouldered navy vet of two Vietnam tours, clapped him on the back fraternally and then explained that he would break Maven’s thumbs if he stole so much as a penny.

After a week or two of long hours stamping his feet out in the bitterly cold night, warding street people away from soft-top Benzes and Lexus SUVs, this threat took the form of a challenge. Every shift now, Maven showed up thinking he wouldn’t steal, only to soften after long hours soaking in the lonesome marinade of night. $36.75 FLAT FEE, ENTER AFTER 6 P.M., NO BLOCKING, EASY-IN/EASY-OUT. He kept it to one or two cars a shift, nothing serious. Latecomers always, inebriates pulling in after midnight, addressing Maven as “my man” or “dude,” and never requesting a receipt, never even noticing him lifting the gate by hand. All they cared about was tucking their silver Saab in near the downtown action, wanting nothing to disrupt the momentum of their weekend night.

It was funny money, the $73.50 he skimmed. He wasted it accordingly, opening the gate at quarter to two and walking a few blocks south to Centerfold’s in the old Combat Zone, dropping his dollars on a couple of quick beers and a table dance before lights-up at two. He was in a bad way. Any money he had left over, he would take two blocks over to Chinatown, ordering a pot of “cold tea” along with the club zombies and the Leather District poseurs and the college seniors too cool for Boston’s puritanical 2 a.m. closing time. Maven sat alone at a cloth-covered table, the piped-in Asian music trickling into his beer buzz like sweet rain as he drank the teapot of draft Bud, throwing back pork dumplings like soft, greasy aspirins. Then he overtipped the rest, tightened up his boot laces, and strapped on his shoulder pack for the long run home.

Home was Quincy, 8.2 miles away.

Running was a purge and a meditation. His thick boots clumped over the cracked streets of rough neighborhoods, along dormant Conrail tracks, and under expressway bridges. Past dark playgrounds and suspicious cars idling at corners, traffic lights blinking yellow overhead, people calling out from porches and stoops, “Who’s chasin’ you, man?”

Quincy is home to beautiful ocean-view properties, seven-figure marina condos, and is the original homestead of this country’s first father-son presidents, the Adamses.

Maven’s converted attic apartment was nowhere near any of these. It had sloped ceilings in every room, a stand-up shower with almost zero water pressure, and stood directly under the approach path into Logan.

This was where he lived now. This was who he was.

Sometimes, during his run, he remembered the dancers and the way they eyed themselves in the strip club’s mirrored walls as they worked the stage: so unashamed and even bored by their public nudity, as though they considered themselves just part of the spectacle, and not in fact its focus.

This was Maven’s attitude toward himself and his own life now. He felt as though he were watching a man slowly slipping over the edge of a deep chasm, not at all concerned that this man was him.

SIX NIGHTS BEFORE, HE HAD NEARLY KILLED A MAN.

The rain had been coming down hard that shift, hard enough to wash away the usual symphony of the downtown weekend: no laughter from passing couples; no Emerson students gloating in packs; no snatches of discussion from scarf-wearing theatergoers; no club-hoppers tripping over sidewalk cracks and laughing off their ass.

The gate had a small booth, but with the rain banging on the tin roof like gunshots, it was easier just to stand outside, letting the rain rap his poncho hood and shoulders, blowing down in sheets from the high security lamps like the rippling sails of a storm-battered ship. He imagined himself a rock beneath a waterfall, and the sensation, as such, was not unpleasant; this was the kind of mind game he had taught himself in the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Pocket Star
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451633394
ISBN 13 
9781451633399
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar