by Chuck Hogan
Randall Frond bumped the wire carousel as he passed it, the porn rack creaking guiltily. He was the only one in there, having just made it before the store's nine o'clock closing. Frond had a cold. He had tried his usual homeopathic herbal remedieseucalyptus oil, ginger root, yarrow leaf, and elm barkbut found he couldn't sweat it away. So here he was, reduced to searching for off-the-shelf cold medicine, the taking of which went expressly against his New Age philosophy. But that's how bad he was plugged up. The last time he'd swallowed a Sudafed, in college during finals week, he had the craziest dreams in his life. Something that messes with your brain chemistry like that can't be any good for you. His girlfriend at the time saved his GPA by brewing him some cinnamon honey tea and feeding him echinacea and raw garlic.
And now, as he prepared to violate his closely held principles for the sake of his sinuses, what did he find before him but empty shelves. Plenty of liquid remedies, Robitussin and NyQuil, but no Sudafed, no Contac, nothing with enough punch to clean out the wad of wet cotton inside his head. Summer colds were the worst.
He brought a bag of Halls dropstheir paltry 5.6 milligrams of menthol would have to doto the front counter, where the owner of the Gulp, the man known as Big Bobby Loom, waited. Frond asked about the Sudafed and received a surly shrug.
Loom said, looking at him over the bag of cough suppressants, "You're the witch, right?"
It wasn't a term Frond cared to deny. Only in its modern connotations was it inaccurate. "That's right," said Frond.
Loom took his money and made change and said not another word.
Feeling worse now than when he had walked in, Frond exited through the swinging door. That's what he got for staying in a town this size; everybody knew everybody else's business.
He was almost at his Jeep when headlights pulled in off Main. Frond made out the light rack on the roof of the patrol car, and slowed near the ice chest, cornered. He wanted to avoid another costly go-round with the Pail brothers. Bogus speeding tickets had already wiped out his "Safe Driver" steps and raised his insurance rate three hundred dollars.
The cop parked right next to his car. Frond saw that it was the new hire, the one they called Maddox. He felt a dash of relief, but kept moving just the same, pulling open his unlocked door. He trusted none of them.
Frond had moved up here seven years ago. Sick of the pace and cost of living in the real world, and in an effort to renounce consumerism, he gave away his television and most of his possessions and retreated to a stone-and-timber house. He subsisted now on Internet sales of New Age paraphernalia and as an online brokerhis 56K dial-up modem demanded Zen-like patiencefor a consortium of potters and weavers in the hills of Mitchum County.
But the modern world didn't like losing even one consumer. That was the only way he could explain his recent turn of bad karma. One good deed had begat a chain of punishments and tiny agonies.
He was fishing his keys out of his shorts pocket when Maddox came around, asking, "Everything all right?"
He started up the engine. Something uneasy about this one. Not an evil vibe, as from the others, but a strange one. He struck Frond as a watcher, as a seeker, and Frond was usually right about people.
Maddox said, "You looked a little spooked when I pulled up."
"Did I?" said Frond, swiping at his nose. Fear worked as well as cayenne in loosening up the nasal passages. "No, just the bright headlights."
"I thought it might be the sight of the patrol car. I heard you had some run-ins with other members of the department."
Harassment was the legal term for it. Intimidation was the purpose. Ever since he had passed Bucky Pail beating up a man in handcuffs by the side of the road. What did it matter that Dillon Sinclair, the sex offender, was the one getting smacked around? Frond did what any good citizen of the world would do: he filed a complaint with the county through the state police. Now he worried every time he left his house.
Maddox said, "If you feel that some members of the police force are overstepping their authority, you should come forward."
"I think I tried that, didn't I?" What was this? Using the new guy to get to him? "They want to punish me until I move, and they might just get their way. You're not so new that you can't know. I'm not the only one who's scared."
The swinging door slapped shut behind Maddox, Big Bobby Loom locking up for the night. He looked them over talking together, then turned and swayed toward his white Fairlane parked around the side.
Why was Frond bothering? When would he learn to keep his mouth closed around Black Falls cops? He shifted his Jeep into gear. "I'm no crusader. Not anymore. State police promised me they'd do something." He was pulling away. "I'm still waiting."
12
TRACY
TRACY COULDN'T SLEEP.
She didn't want to call, but lying there in the dark wasn't getting her anywhere, thinking hard and not sleeping, so she picked up the phone. The green-backlit number pad was the only light in her room as she dialed three numbers.
"Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?"
"Yes, well there's this guy I've been seeing for about four months, okay?"
"Ma'am?"
"Actually, four months, six days, twenty-two hours. Give or take a few minutes."
"Go ahead."
"Well, today I stopped by his house and I caught him with this total low-rent hoochie."
"You say a hoochie?"
"Big-time hoochie."
"Ma'am, this line is intended for emergencies only."
"This is an emergency, or it wasfor me, anyway. There was an altercation, but it was mostly verbal. Actually, it was mostly me."
"Anyone hurt?"
"Not really, no. I tried to inflict some emotional damage, but as usual it totally backfired. So now I'm home all alone, stressing out that I embarrassed myself beyond repair."
"I'm sure that's not the case. I bet you behaved admirably well under the circumstances."
"I just wanted you to know. I'm not mad."
"Good."
"But I'm no pushover either. I'm no doormat."
"Okay."
"But leaving you that way, us parting the way we did that hurt the most. That felt really shitty. I don't ever want to do that again, okay?"
"Okay."
"Okay. What are you doing now? I picture you sulking the night away."
"I'm reading. While I sulk."
She pushed herself up on her pillow. "That same war book?"
"Volume three. Marching toward Appomattox."
"Do you think it's weird that people have favorite wars?"
"I guess I do, yeah."
"I'd say Revolutionary War people are optimists. Birth of a nation and all that. Brightly colored uniforms, fireworks in the skyright? World War Two people, they seem sort of downbeat. Drab and tough and dirty. We won, but at what cost? Realists. But Civil War peopleI would say we are humanists. You know, brother against brother, a nation divided. People interested in people, in their fellow countrymen."
"And slow readers."
"That too. Did you bring lunch? Since we never actually ate, I thought maybe I could"
"I did bring something, yeah."
She shook her head in the darkness of the room, pushing past his reluctance. "Well, do you want some company when you take your forty? A midnight lunch, like the first time"
"I can't. Not tonight."
She lay very still in order that he wouldn't hear the pillow crunching or the mattress creaking or any other sounds of distress. "You have to be somewhere later?"
"I do."
"Okay," she said. She moved her head a little, just to clue him in. "And I'm not going to take that the wrong way. I'm not going to overreact."
"Good."
"I'm definitely not going to think you're meeting Wanda."
"You know I'm not."
"Of course I do." She let some silence play. "Of course."
"The badge and the gun, they mean something in a town full of not
hing. To some people. That's all that is."
Not me, she thought. She wished he would take them both off, and for good. She pictured him there at the station with his book open on his lap, wondering why he bothered with her at all. "Is this humiliating call going to be saved forever on tape?"
"I switched off the recorder when the Sam Lake address came up."
"You're lucky she's so gross, you know. I meanlucky."
"I do know it."
"I can tell by your voice, you're smiling."
"I can tell by yours, you're lying down. In bed?"
"I was worried you were going to try and hand me some bullshit. Like that she was in trouble or something. Like you were 'helping' her."
"What are you wearing?"
"Uh-uh," she said. "No way."
"I can tell by your voice," he said, "you're smiling."
"Just tell me that all this sneaking around is really necessary."
"All this sneaking around is really necessary."
"I don't know how cops' wives do it. I really can't imagine."
"You can't?"
She couldn't believe he had just said that. "Don't play with me. Mr. 'I'll-never-lie-to-you.' Mr. 'I'll-be-brutally-honest-when-it's-time-to-break-your-heart.'"
Across the silence of the phone line, she broadcast her thoughts: Ask me to go away with you. See how fast I can pack.
Yet the shame of this secret desire, her guilty ambition, reddened her cheeks. She thought of the barn, the llamas sleeping under the summer moon, and everything she had to do after dawn. But especially her mother, in her bed in the room across the hall. How profoundly the deaf sleep.
13
CULLEN
"SUMMER MORNINGS," said Cullen. "The air, before it heats up? Nothing like it. A gift. This is the only time of year when I don't question what the hell are we doing still living here."
Maddox, taciturn Maddox, sat over his food across from Cullen in the red vinyl booth.
"Must be nice for you these days," said Cullen, pursuing him, "seeing the sun come up. I don't imagine that happened much in your previous incarnations."
Maddox picked apart his omelet with the precision of a laboratory scientist, exposing and extracting cubes of Canadian bacon, chunks of green pepper and mushroom, inspecting each before allowing them into his mouth. "Not really."
Cullen surveyed his own lumberjack special, which had seemed like such a good idea when he ordered it. Now he'd be knocked out all morning, bloated and yawning.
Cullen sponged up some blueberry syrup, washed it down with a gulp of coffee. He looked out the window of the pancake house, cars curling around the rotary and up the highway ramps. Rainfield was a mid-sized town of strip malls, fast food, and on-the-go convenience massed like plaque at the arterial interchange of a north-south interstate and an east-west route. Not much to look at, and even less to visit, but with its Best Buy, Kohl's, chain restaurants, and a six-screen movie theater, to the scratch towns of northern Mitchum County it was a metropolis. The region's Las Vegas.
Most people, when they hear the words "western Massachusetts," think of the rustic Berkshires, wine and cheese on the lawn at Tangle-wood, or antiqueing in Stockbridge. But getting out to Norman Rockwell country from Boston means passing through Mitchum County first. It is the only county in Massachusetts without a city. The Cold River Valley is 725 square miles of natural isolation, rivers, hills, farmlands, and old New England. Less visible to the naked eye is the fact that, while per capita crime rates are generally low, domestic ills such as spousal and child abuse, child neglect, single-parent families, and unemployment run high. Towns that rank at the bottom in median income, yet near the top in lottery revenue. A well of desperation hidden deep in the valley, pain-filled voices that go unheard.
Cullen saw Rainfield as an open-air convenience store spread out over miles. A good deal of drug crime happened here, with the associated sordid living and dead-end behavior. This place made the town of Mitchum, the county seat where Cullen lived and worked as a prosecutor of narcotics crimes for the district attorney's office, look quaint and almost clean. The amounts seized in busts here were not large by national standards, nor was the level of drug violence statistically very high. But the devastation to families was the same if not worse.
Heroin came across from upstate New York, pot down from Canada. Cocaine was cheap these days, but currently on the ebb. What surprised Cullen most about what he saw was the effect that market forces had on drug trends. People don't become addicted to a particular drug, he had learned. They become addicted to doing drugs, period, and when conditions such as purity or availability or price change drastically, people will trade one poison for another. Simple as that. No brand loyalty exists when you're dopesick and looking to score.
It would be nice to get on top of things for a change. To be ahead of the curve. They had a real chance here to head off the Next Big Thing before it metastasized and reshaped the landscape.
Maddox wiped his mouth, again sweeping the restaurant with his eyes. Force of habit, Cullen guessed. Meeting with Maddox always put him on edge.
"My boy, Kyle," said Cullen, checking his watch and signaling the server for the check. "A soccer prodigy. Or so I'm told. Great moves, fast feet, everybody telling me, 'Hire a coach, you'll make it all back in scholarships. Groom him.' I'm like, groom him for what? It's soccer. Maybe the eighth or ninth most popular sport in the United States, behind Frisbee and probably bowling. Kids have been playing in leagues for two generations now, and it's catching on about as fast as the metric system. Watching him the other day, I figured out why. You know why?"
Maddox shrugged, barely putting forth the effort of humoring him.
"Because Americans don't trust a game where you can't use your hands. A sport that actually forbids use of the hands, people can't understand that. 'Pick up the damn ball and throw it in the frigging net!' But he's eight, what does he know? He loves it. So I put him in a camp for the summer. We'll see what happens."
Maddox pulled six jelly packets from the sugar caddy, stacking them and unstacking them like a casino dealer. In terms of exchanging information, these monthly get-togethers were strictly a formality and could have been transacted over the telephone. They met so that Cullen could evaluate Maddox in person. And, as usual, he found himself doing most of the talking.
"Six months now," said Cullen. "Here's the word, and it comes from on high. She believes we will be able to move on this. She wants to move on this, sooner rather than later."
"This an election year?"
"Heyevery year is an election year. But don't get on her for that. There's always that part of it, of everything, that's the job. But she is good, and by that I mean, she is a prosecutor. This is a big juicy piece of meat here. She wants to carve it up nice and thick."
"Okay." Maddox nodded, still scanning the joint. "Good."
"But it's not enough yet. The press'll gobble up any bloody thing she throws down for them, but for herself, and for the community at large, she's got expensive tastes. She wants to serve this up right."
"Fine by me."
"I know it's fine by you. It's been six months."
Maddox said, "You're thinking, Hey, it's a small town, make fast work of it. But it's just the opposite. Everybody knows everybody else. That said, things are starting to break open now. I thought I was going to have something for you this morning. Something of consequence."
Cullen waited. "But?"
"But he stood me up last night."
"Okay. What does that mean to you?"
"I don't know. Either of two things. Either something is up with himor else he's ducking me. Which means that something else is up."
"Where can he go, right? Small town. He has to turn up."
Maddox shrugged, leaving it at that.
Cullen said, "They want me to revisit with you the hardware."
"Look," said Maddox, firm but not agitated. "It's not that I have anything against it. No one's frisking me or a
nything like that. It's just unnecessary. They don't discuss anything in front of me. This isn't like before, when I'm a party to illegal activity. I'm just a snoop here. But what I get, when I get it, will be better than words on a wire. It will be evidence, hard and fast."
