Without that money he was finished.
He felt a wash of animal panic. They’d foreclose his house, repo his truck. He had written a big check to the Mass Department of Revenue, gambling that the Lomax money would arrive in time. That one was going to bounce, and up into five figures which is felony fraud in this state.
Could he leap downstairs and grab Lomax, put a kitchen knife to his throat until he wrote the check? No, no, no, it would have to be cash. With this guy even cash was suspect. He probably had counterfeit bills stashed away. And he knew what came next. Lomax would charge him with assault-and-battery not to mention grand theft and trespassing.
It didn’t matter. Lomax had hollowed him out. He was weak and nauseous. He had no strength to attack anyone.
At the far side of the giant living room, at the door to the little study Mike had repainted so many times, he noticed a flicker of movement. Someone else was eavesdropping. He recognized the tangle of red hair, the pale white face: Kathleen, the daughter. Their eyes met across the sixty feet of tainted air. For a second, Mike was sure she was going to bust them, jump out, point a finger, start yelling. She moved her hand, but it was only to cross her lips with a conspiratorial finger. She was scared, too. She had no more business being here than Mike and Tanya did.
The difference was, they could escape.
Tanya’s voice was a harsh whisper. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They crept down the stairs, darted past the wide entry to the living room, in plain sight for a second or two. But no one was looking. They found their coats in the foyer and a minute later they were closing the massive front door behind them. They stood in the deep breathless cold of the winter night.
“I came here to kill him,” Tanya said.
He could barely hear her over the roaring panic in his head, like the snarl of a job site air-compressor, building pressure. When it finally shut down, the silence meant the carpenters could use their nailguns again. They could get to work. Until then they were stalled. He faced Tanya, with nothing to say.
“He killed my sister,” she added. She could see he couldn’t grasp her words. She shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
They stood silently, haunting the night with their breath.
“You want a ride home?,” she asked.
He pulled his social self around him, buttoned it like a coat. “Yeah,” he managed. “If that’s okay. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’ve got a lot of thinking to do. Lomax put you in a bad spot. But you’re smart. You’ll get out of this. People do.”
Yeah, he thought. Except the ones who don’t. They’re called homeless people. He might have been able to handle living in a box and eating out of soup kitchens. But he had a wife and she was pregnant.
They didn’t talk at all on the drive home. Or maybe Tanya said something. He didn’t notice. He was pawing through his circumstances, his jobs and customers, his family and friends, debts he could cash in, obligations he could stall, looking for a solution. It was like rummaging through the kitchen junk drawer for his car keys. The only real question was, how many times would you dump it out and sort through stamps and corkscrews and defunct cell-phone chargers before you accepted that the keys weren’t there?
So he kept searching. An advance on the Keller job? But that wasn’t supposed to start until Spring. Or the Silverstein job? But they were living here and they’d expect him there every day. That was fine—he wouldn’t be working for Lomax anymore. But the money wasn’t enough. He’d have to start at least three jobs and lay off people at the same time. He couldn’t afford to pay anyone anything. He could conceivably get first checks from Foley and Landau but the Foleys were here all winter, too—and the Landau’s caretaker was Pat Folger. Pat would be checking up daily, and he’d be delighted to bust Mike with the owners if he wasn’t on the job.
Mike stared out at the dark trees streaming past the passenger side window. He couldn’t make this work. He couldn’t be on all those jobs simultaneously, with just him and Haffner. Maybe he could keep Briley, but everyone else had to go. He added it up: if he got all the checks this week, or next week at the latest, if he could convince the Kellers to let him start early, that would just cover his outstanding obligations. No, he’d still be about twenty-five hundred shy. And that was only until the first week’s wages were due; and he’d have no more money from anyone until he got to the halfway mark. He was up to the limit on his charge at Marine; how was he supposed to buy the materials for three new jobs at once? That was around fifteen hundred bucks right there. He added it up. He needed six thousand dollars to survive this siege. Not even to survive it, just to get to the next onslaught. But if Bob and Derek would agree to wait for their checks until Mike got the next checks from the owners, and everyone agreed to let him start, and paid him quickly…no, no good, with the materials and the mortgage, he was still four thousand dollars in the red. And he needed some money to live on—food and gas. A grand? Would that do it? Say it would: that meant he had to find five thousand dollars by tomorrow.
Tanya pulled into his driveway. Lights were on in the little house. Cindy was up. He glanced at the dashboard clock: 11:45. It wasn’t even that late.
“You’re home.”
“Thanks.” He unfolded himself into the cold night air. He stood in his driveway, watching Tanya’s truck back out into the deserted street and the answer came to him, discovered like those keys in the junk drawer. There was only one place to go, only one person he could turn to at this moment.
He climbed into his own truck and started the long drive to Billy Delavane’s house in Madaket.
Mike had known Billy Delavane all his life. They had grown up together, building forts in the national forest with Strong Wings, sledding Dead Horse Valley on snow days. They had combed the prized sections of Madaket harbor together, with push rakes and dip nets, when family scallop season began in October, opening their one bushel a week at the Delavane shanty on North Wharf, cooking them at big family dinners on autumn nights.
They had learned to drive battered, family pickups on the rutted grass at Tom Nevers, done the parties at 30th Pole, and the Madequecham Jam every year, before the cops started breaking it up; chased the same girls, drank the same cheap beer, bought the same weed from the same sleazy high school entrepreneurs.
Both of their parents were in the trades; Mike’s Dad had painted behind Danny “Duke” Delavane since the mid-seventies. They had each learned their skills on a thousand job sites; they had eventually inherited their family’s companies, customers, and crew. But Billy had hated being a general contractor, sucking up to imperious customers, arguing with crazy subs and chasing money. Working for Pat Folger was easier.
After his parents died, Billy didn’t have to work anymore, but he liked it. He could hold all the calculations for a seven-foot bar or a three-story staircase in his head, and rout a newel post by hand while he watched a Red Sox game. So Pat Folger kept him around. Pat had a ruthless knack for making the most out of his employees. He said if you want to survive on Nantucket you have to know how to get limited use out of limited people. Some of his guys were drunks; he didn’t expect them at work until ten in the morning. Some of them were only happy banging shingles or running baseboard; he made sure he had enough shingles and baseboard going to keep them busy. Billy surfed and Pat didn’t expect him at work when there was a south swell running and an offshore breeze to smooth it out.
Billy’s family had lived on the island much longer than Mike’s—six generations. They had held onto their property not out of some shrewd investment strategy but simply because they loved it. Now Billy and his brother probably owned twenty-million dollars’ worth of undeveloped land and crumbling nineteenth-century houses around the island. Occasionally they sold off a one-acre tract or a beach cottage to pay the taxes.
Mike had helped Billy clear out his parents’ house after the
y died. It was packed with thirty years’ accumulation of pack-rat trash: collections of animal skulls and fishing lures, mold-rotted books and antique jam jars, bales of twine and barbed wire, lobster pots and scallop boxes, checkbooks and unopened bills from the 1960s, lampshades and chair cushions, broken radios, and unraveling wicker. After a week of ten-hour days they were able to see the floor. When the Thomas Tompion grandfather clock and the Tony Sarg puzzles had been taken to the auction house and everything else had been carted to the dump, the cleaning had begun. The once-white walls were stained a toxic amber from decades of cigarette smoke; they were black from mold where the roof leaked. Mike and Billy wore vapor masks and rubber gloves and scrubbed the place for another week. Ed never volunteered to help; neither did anyone else.
It made sense: Mike and Billy had always been the real brothers. There was a ten-year gap between Mike and his big sister, so it was natural for him to invent his own siblings. There was rivalry, mostly over women. But when Billy got a local jock’s girlfriend pregnant, when he was broke and desperate, Mike had pulled six hundred dollars out of his college savings, along with another four hundred for travel expenses (it was already pretty clear that he wasn’t going to college), so Joyce Thayer could go to Boston and get an abortion.
Joyce had stayed in Boston. Apparently she met someone that year at BC and wound up having the baby. She never said anything to Billy and she never came back to the island. Billy tried to reach her. He wrote several long letters, but never got an answer. As Mike reluctantly pointed out at the end of a long drunken night, that itself was an answer—an emphatic one.
Billy had eventually paid Mike back the money, and he was a rich man now, generous, always glad to help Mike with short term loans—a thousand here or there until a check cleared or a job started. But this was different. He had never borrowed this much money from Billy before. More importantly, he had never asked for a loan without knowing when he’d be able to pay it back. And he’d never been this desperate, driving too fast with rage and dread self-loathing climbing his throat as he took a turn too wide and the wheels shuddered against the jumbled dirty snow on the shoulder. These curves were deceptive. He eased back to forty miles an hour. Soon he was crossing Millie’s bridge, turning onto the ruts and craters of Maine Avenue.
The lights glowed from Billy’s beach shack. Mike parked and sat in the car, listening to the surf and the faint sound of Van Morrison from Billy’s house, carried on the wind. “Blue Money.” How appropriate. He had no idea what he was going to say, or how he was going to begin.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to say anything.
Billy came to the door in sweatpants and an old Delavane Construction T-shirt. The wood stove was going and the little house was warm. There was a faint smell of varnish. Van was singing “Cleaning Windows” now. Maybe it was a message; people always needed their windows cleaned. Billy’s pug, Dervish, jumped up, front paws on Mike’s knees, curlicue tail twitching. Mike leaned over to rub behind the little dog’s ears. Dervish had a nice little set-up here. A warm house, constant attention, and all the food he could eat. “Hey, Dervish,” he said. “Good boy.” Dervish stretched to lick his nose. Some people would have been disgusted by that; Mike took it as a compliment.
He straightened up and Billy said, “Come in. Have a drink. Tell me how much you need.”
“No, look, I didn’t—”
Billy took his shoulder and pulled him inside. “Hey, relax, check yourself out. It has to be money, unless Cindy’s leaving you. Or you have something incurable, and I can’t help with that.” He kicked the door closed with his foot and stared at Mike. “Wait a second. Is Cindy leaving you?”
“No, not yet…at least, I hope not.”
“Then, let’s get out of here. I’ve been working this bird feeder all night. I was just getting some sealer on it.”
“You missed the party.”
“No, I showed up early, had a few drinks, and split. Pat was trying to corner me. The McKittricks’ basement is leaking and they’re suing him. He wants me to testify if it goes to court.” He grabbed his coat off the rack near the door, and pulled it on. “I built the kids’ bunk bed and installed the cabinets. What the hell do I know about the basement? Anyway, if he wants to talk about, it he can do it on his own time, on the job. It’s not cocktail party talk. Except, Pat doesn’t have anything else to talk about. Come on, let’s get to the Box before it closes.”
Mike explained the situation as they rode back to town. He was finishing as they turned away from the Stop& Shop into the Chicken Box parking lot: “So I need five thousand dollars and I have no idea when I’ll be able to pay it back.”
Billy laughed. “Don’t stop there—really sell me. Say you’ll gamble it all away at Mohegan Sun and then avoid me like I was contagious for the next five years.”
“No man, come on, you know there’s no way—”
Billy punched him on the arm, “I’m kidding. Relax. Gentleman’s rule: retain your sense of humor under duress.”
Mike let out a long breath. “Oh yeah—I remember those rules. Your dad was great. Borderline psychotic, but great.”
“And he really was a gentleman, in his own way. He never broke his own rules. Don’t argue about politics. Pick up the tab. Notice small improvements. Remember birthdays. Call home. Walk the dog.”
“Help your friends.”
Billy nodded. “Treat them like family. Because they are.”
He leaned over and pulled his checkbook out of his pocket, pulled a pen from the ashtray, scribbled a check, tore it off, handed it over.
Mike was confused. “This is for seventy-five hundred dollars.”
“That was one of my dad’s best rules: a gentleman never asks for as much as he needs.”
“Thank you.”
Billy cuffed him lightly on the head, “Come on. Let’s shoot some pool and have a beer. You’re buying.”
Chapter Twenty
Romance and Retribution
“I just wish there was something I could do to him,” Mike said.
They were still at the Chicken Box, drinking draft Guinness. Billy Delavane was running the pool table. With Billy’s check in his pocket Mike’s frenzy had subsided, but he could still feel the noise of it resonating in the silence, like a football stadium after a playoff game.
“There’s things you can do. Four ball in the corner.” Billy had an expert ease with the pool cue, leaning over the table, giving a couple of smooth piston warmups and a single sure strike that sent the cue ball rocketing at the corner. It knocked in the four ball and floated back to the middle of the table. “Six in the side.”
Mike took a long swallow. “Like what?”
“You’re a Nantucketer. You have to use the classic Nantucket weapons.”
“Mildew? Red tide? Powder Post beetles?”
Billy looked up, grinning. “Gossip,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“That’s your weapon. Good old-fashioned small-town back-stabbing gossip. Three in the side.” He walked around the table for the shot. The white ball brushed past its target, tipping it down and gone. Another rumble; then silence, or as close to silence as you could get, with U2 howling about a street with no name from the other side of the room. The Irish lads had control of the jukebox tonight.
Mike finished his beer. “How would that work?”
“Look around you. There are some crazy people on this island. Some of them are so crazy they can’t live anywhere else. A lot of them have guns. And most of them have been working on the Lomax job for the last eight months. I see four carpenters, three floor guys, two electricians, and a partridge in a pear tree. No, that’s Pat Folger getting a rash in his dress up wool turtleneck. He must like to suffer.”
Mike took in the crowd at the bar: Tom Danziger, Lomax’s electrician; Arturo Maturo, his plumber. Both of them were capable of mu
rder. And the landscaper—Jane something…Stiles, that was it—was shooting pool at the next table with the big blonde who ran her crew. Those girls were scary. Pushing a lawnmower all day made you strong, and Jane had a temper. Mike had watched her fire a customer last summer, one day before a giant wedding reception was scheduled at the lady’s house. “You don’t treat me like a human being, and I’m sick of it,” she had said, and stalked off across the uncut lawn, past the un-pruned hydrangeas, over the un-weeded driveway, while the lady sobbed, “What’ll I do, what’ll I do?” Jane turned back. Her Parthian shot: “Treat people better.”
That girl was one tough customer. Was she a killer? Who knew? Mike was warming to Billy’s plan. His dad always said. “Kill ’em with the truth.” This crowd might just take the phrase literally.
Why not? This was definitely a truth worth killing for.
Billy checked his watch. “We have time. Let’s get another round.”
“It’s a good thing I don’t own that watch,” Mike said. Tilting his head down an inch, toward the Patek Phillipe on Billy’s wrist. “I’d have sold it a long time ago.”
“I don’t think so. Not if you knew the history. Not if you’d lived it.”
“And you’re never going to tell me, so fuck it.”
“Sounds like you’re finally giving up. Quit when you know it’s futile.”
“Dad’s rule?”
“One of the best. Okay, here we go.”
He nodded as they approached the crush of bodies at the bar, giving Mike his cue.
Mike started talking in mid-sentence. “—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I heard Lomax talking. I was right there. He’s going to stiff everyone. He doesn’t care. Fuck, man, he was bragging about it! He’s like some creepy kid pouring gasoline into an ant hill. He likes killing the bugs. That’s us, by the way. We’re just a bunch or worker ants to that piece of shit.”
Nantucket Sawbuck Page 15
