Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  “What?”

  “Traffic problem.”

  “Really.”

  “Building that looks weird.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “Because that’s the kind of thing I know.”

  Candace turns quiet. “Just don’t be out long,” she says. “And don’t take your gun.”

  He nods. “Just surveillance,” he says. “Fact-finding mission.”

  “Not a trouble-finding mission?” Candace lies sprawled on the bed, eyes half open.

  “I’ve got more than enough trouble already.”

  “If you’re talking about me, thanks.”

  Harkness heads out into the city, still wide awake late on a crisp fall night.

  Harkness stands on the retaining wall next to the harbor, just out of view of the last diners finishing dessert at the Daily Catch. He takes out the digital bee, the little drone that Patrick loves like a new puppy. Controller in one hand, bee in the other, he presses the tiny button and the bee springs to life, rising out of his hand and moving across the water.

  The bee lets Narco-Intel go inside meth labs in Springfield, pill mills in Cambridge, and weed warehouses from Chelsea to Quincy. But tonight its rotors seize up and it drops like a rock down into the black water, its long career ending with an audible and expensive plop.

  Harkness wonders how he’s going to break the news to Patrick. Somewhere deep in the centuries of harbor murk waits a five-thousand-dollar bee-size drone created by humorless Swiss engineers. Harkness sticks the controller in the lower pocket of his black cargo pants.

  He could walk back home where Candace sleeps, warm in their bed. Or he can walk over and take a closer look at the suspicious building that he watched from their apartment all summer, wondering what was going on inside. Dozens of workmen descended on the weathered building, turning it sleek—a new slate roof and bay windows, a dock stretching into the harbor. Now the place is empty during the day but packed at night, though there’s not a word about it, online or anywhere.

  From more than enough time spent in Chinatown dives, Kenmore Square clubs, and Southie taverns, Harkness knows that no good ever comes from an after-hours haunt in Boston. Resisting the lure of nestling in for the night, Harkness walks downtown, heading toward the sickly yellow lights of the Clam Digger, the worst seafood restaurant in Boston.

  Customers who stumble into the Clam Digger looking for anything other than a beer sponge, more beer, or both, face several difficult decisions. Fried clams with bellies (for the adventurer) or just strips (for the squeamish)? Lobster roll with real lobster or the fake fish sticks dyed to look like lobster? The frost-burned stuffed quahogs or the potentially deadly steamers?

  Harkness’s father loved the Digger, with its porthole-shaped windows and nets on the walls dotted with an incoherent assortment of region-inappropriate aquatic life—varnished pufferfish, king crabs, conch shells—and enough tangled sets of car keys to fuel a neighborhood swinger night. Red liked to stop here on the way to the airport, mostly as an excuse to tank up on cheap preflight vodka tonics but also to etch away Nagog’s high-toned veneer from his sons’ worldviews. Hanging out in a dim bar with polyurethane-slathered tables embedded with coins was his version of keeping it real.

  Tonight the Digger is packed with college students, the tables crowded beerscapes of Sam Adams longnecks. They’re smart enough to know to skip the food. Harkness pays for a beer and a shot of whiskey, walks into the bathroom, and waits for it to clear out. He drinks a little beer then dumps some of the whiskey over his head and rubs it in like Vitalis, Clubman, or another old-style hair tonic.

  Outside, he staggers onto the Northern Avenue Bridge, whiskey dribbling down his chin and onto his T-shirt. When he was a teenager, Harkness used to cross this bridge to get to the Waterfront, a cavernous club with great bands and lax doormen. Some nights when he walked past, Harkness would see old men playing cards in the harbormaster’s shack, a dilapidated building perched on half-rotten pilings a hundred yards out in the water, connected only by a metal ladder and a walkway corroded with brown-red rust.

  Now the place looks like a members-only nightclub, its lights steaming in the cooling air. Harkness wonders who’s coming here night after night and what they’re doing. The digital bee failed to find an answer. But Harkness is ready to try, even if it means stinking like cheap whiskey, again.

  Harkness sways toward the security guards, weaving across the Northern Avenue Bridge, crowded with Mercedes, BMWs, and a black SUV that Harkness recognizes as the mayor’s.

  “Got some party goin’ on, yeah!” he shouts, getting close enough to let his whiskey wind waft over the pair of guards.

  “Private event,” one of them says.

  “Get the fuck out of here now,” the other adds.

  “What’s going on, dudes, bros, dude-bros?” Harkness slurs. How people treat drunks says a lot about them.

  “None of your business.”

  Harkness sways closer to try to get a glimpse inside the windows but the two guards move together like meaty doors. He notices a silver skyline on their black SWAT team vests, some kind of logo.

  “Tha’s cool,” Harkness says. “Privacy, I’m down with that.” He glances at the gleaming cars. “Mayor’s here, huh? Voted for the guy.”

  “We don’t care.” The guard steps forward to shove Harkness against a steel bridge support still spray-painted with the names of long-gone bands. He takes out a metal nightstick with a pivot handle—illegal, Harkness thinks, as the guard takes a swing at his head. Harkness ducks. He wishes he hadn’t listened to Candace about leaving his gun at home.

  The guard jabs with the nightstick, hitting Harkness on the lower back and dropping him to the gritty road with a kidney shot, cheap but effective. Harkness pushes on his palms and rises slowly, the pain blossoming. “Not a very nice thing to do, hitting a guy who ain’t causing any trouble.”

  “Get the fuck out of here or we’ll arrest you. We’re cops.”

  “You? You’re not cops,” Harkness says. “And you can’t arrest anyone.”

  “Try us, asshole.”

  Harkness reaches into his pocket to take out his badge, then rises to his feet. Dropping the whiskey stagger, he walks straight ahead, holding his badge in front of him like a talisman. “Detective Edward Harkness, BPD,” he says, slur suddenly cured. “Hands where I can see them, both of you.”

  They look at each other, deciding whether to believe Harkness or beat him some more.

  “Don’t believe me? Go ask Lieutenant Landers. He’s here with the mayor, right?”

  They’re stunned. Private security guards don’t get a lot of training. They just have to be linebacker-size and mean. They raise their arms as high as their musclebound bodies let them. “What do you want, man?”

  “Answers.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I won’t charge you with assault, impersonating a police officer, or carrying an illegal weapon,” Harkness says. “How’s that sound?”

  They nod in unison. It sounds good.

  Harkness takes out his notebook. “First question—who’s in there?” Harkness lifts his chin toward the old harbormaster’s shack, now retrofitted into something more. “And I mean everyone.”

  17

  THE INSISTENT BUZZ running through the Nagog High auditorium grows louder and the crowd stirs and focuses as the vote approaches. Dozing elders jostle awake as Wade Buckholtz creeps slowly to center stage, leaning on an aluminum walker. Harkness nudges Candace and she takes out her earbuds.

  “I can’t believe WB’s still the town moderator,” Candace says.

  “Me neither.” Harkness pictures him sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the E-Z Mart.

  “WB’s wife died of pancreatic cancer last year,” Nora whispers. “She was in my unit. It was terrible.” She shivers. “He was totally devastated.”

  WB takes the microphone from its stand and whips the cord around like a televangelist. “Now we come
to the last vote of the evening,” he says with reverence. “ ‘Article 167: A Ruling to Uphold the 1798 Billeting Rule in the Town Bylaws.’ ”

  WB totters forward, leaning on his walker, followed by two Scouts (one Boy, one Girl) carrying the American flag and the Nagog flag, which bears the date of Nagog’s founding, 1635, and images of the somber-faced heads of nine redcoats arrayed in rows above the town motto: Nine Men’s Misery for Thee!

  “I’d like for everyone to stand,” WB says quietly. “Those of you who can.”

  The crowd rises, papers rustling, bad hips creaking.

  Nora watches the stage intently. “I don’t think WB needs that walker.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “No tennis balls on the bottom of the front legs,” she says. “They make it slide. Otherwise it doesn’t really work.” A nurse at Nagog Regional, Nora knows plenty about old people.

  Harkness stares at his little sister, impressed.

  “You’re not the only one who notices things, Eddy,” she says.

  “As we deliberate and vote on this final article,” WB says, “we must remember that the passions of the moment are not always the best guide for our conduct in the future.” For a frail man, his voice is reassuringly loud and calm. “And if a town-meeting action requires sacrifice by some, may it be only where the common goal is worthy of the sacrifice.” He pauses. “Let us each approach this critical issue, difficult and divisive, with open hearts and minds. Like the tolerant community that the town of Nagog has always been.”

  Mild applause from the crowd at this noble but unrealistic assessment. As everyone sits back down, sharp glances ping through the room. The crowd includes closet drunks who careen their whiskey-dinged Escalades through town, clipping every car parked along Main Street. There are real estate developers who built egregious apartment complexes on top of vernal ponds and burial grounds. There are investment bankers who divorced their bitter wives to remarry secretaries younger than their daughters. There are bored moms who had sweaty affairs with their Ukrainian fitness trainer, Demitri, the lanky lothario of the Nagog Gym.

  There are neighbors who are just plain assholes and everyone knows it.

  WB recognizes the first speaker, and a fleshy, bald man mounts the stage. It’s Jim McGinnis, a former town selectman and owner of the Powderhorn Café, where the Rotary meets every Friday morning, because coffee refills are free there.

  “These people.” He shouts into the microphone as if trying to communicate with someone trapped at the bottom of a well. “These people have invaded our town, seized our buildings, and cloaked their true mission. They’re freeloaders intent on subverting our rights as landowners. I insist that my fellow townspeople vote no to abolish this archaic provision and send the wanderers”—he pauses to add air quotes—“back to Boston where they belong.” He returns the microphone to WB, who relays it to the second speaker.

  It’s Miriam Ling—forty-something, diminutive, and wearing the distinctive red blazer of the Nagog Home Team.

  “Why’s she dressed like it’s Christmas already?” Candace whispers.

  “She’s a Realtor,” Harkness says.

  Candace looks confused. “So?”

  “They wear blazers,” Nora says.

  “Why’re they red?”

  “Because people like Christmas,” Harkness says.

  “The Nagog Home Team bakes an apple pie at every open house so it smells homey,” Nora adds. “Did you know that?”

  The couple sitting in front of them makes a sound like air escaping from an inner tube.

  Miriam begins. “As many of you know, I’m in the home business.” She gives a bleachy smile. “I think nothing’s more important than loving your neighbor. No matter who that neighbor might be.”

  Eyes roll at this blatant biblical ploy, a Baptist move here in the land of Episcopalians, or God’s Frozen People, as Harkness’s father called them. Many in the crowd dismiss the idea of loving all of one’s neighbors as an impractical myth, like the unconditional love that parents are supposed to provide but probably don’t.

  In flinty Nagog, no one loves the unlovable—at least not for long.

  Miriam barges ahead as if she’s breezing through a crappy sunken ’70s den lined with knotty-pine paneling on the way to the five-star living room with an awesome home theater. “We are very blessed here in Nagog. Blessed with a beautiful town, hundreds of acres of conservation land, a rich history that dates to colonial times—”

  “There was history here before the white people came,” blurts out Larry Three Drinking Gourds, the town’s sole supposedly Native American citizen, who claims he’s part Wampanoag.

  General eye-rolling of the here-we-go-again variety greets the latest outburst from Larry, a cheerless, morbidly obese man who glides in his flag-bedecked mobility scooter to an endless array of civic meetings, from the monthly free-for-alls at the zoning board of appeals to the committee meetings for the annual Ice Swap.

  Miriam recovers. “Of course, Larry. And there’ll be history here long after we’re gone. And I’d like for us to be remembered as the Nagogians who welcomed people in need into our community and into our hearts. Or at least into our converted garages, pool houses, and underused art studios. For this reason and many more I encourage you to vote yes on Article 167, preserving the hospitality for which the great town of Nagog is known for now and will remain known for long into the future.”

  The allotted thirty minutes of debate crawls on like a visit to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. The no-people are pissed off, as if the wanderers have barged into a sacred cave where their ancestors’ bones are stored instead of just moving into their outbuildings for a few weeks. The yes-people are weepy do-gooders who see this vote as a referendum on the mutable soul of the community. Someone calls them climate refugees, a genius phrase that pushes the green thinkers in the crowd over to the yes side.

  To Harkness, the general drift of the diatribes boils down to this: A yes vote preserves the benevolent and welcoming nature of small-town Nagog. A no vote protects the rights of landowners to do whatever the hell they want. It’s the age-old fight between individual freedom and the collective good played out in a town just like any other—kind at its core, but wary of strangers.

  At almost two A.M., the debate ends and the assembled citizens raise their clunky beige keypads to vote. Nora and Candace find theirs. But since Harkness no longer owns a house in Nagog, he’s voteless.

  “Listen to me, citizens of Nagog,” Wade Buckholtz says. “All in favor of upholding the 1798 billeting rule from the town bylaws and allowing the wanders to stay should vote yes.” He pauses. “All in favor of striking this regulation and banishing the wanderers should vote no. You may vote . . .”

  He looks at his watch. “Now.”

  The keyboards clack and the total of yes and no votes tallies on the enormous screen behind him.

  The numbers increase jerkily as people fish their reading glasses from their NPR tote bags and spotted fingers struggle to press the right key.

  Candace waits for the total to materialize, then holds her beige keypad up. The vote stands at 259 yes, 259 no.

  “Candace.” Harkness reaches for her arm. “I think you need to . . .”

  She’s focusing on her keypad. “Right, I need to vote now,” she says.

  “Maybe you should leave it tied.”

  “No way,” she says a little too loudly, then presses a key.

  “All votes in?” Moderator Buckholtz asks, then waits a couple of beats. “Voting is complete.”

  The crowd swivels toward the screen. The number of yes votes turns slowly to 260.

  “The article passes by one vote,” he says. “The regulation stands. The wanderers can stay.”

  Half the crowd groans, the other applauds.

  “Candace, you just passed the article,” Harkness says.

  “I did not,” she says. “I just ended up casting the last vote.”

  “Okay, but we’re n
ot going to tell them that.” Harkness points at the seething crowd. Half the audience might as well be waving burning torches.

  “No one cares, Eddy.”

  “Oh yeah? Everyone cares.”

  Candace looks down at the front of the auditorium. “Hey, is that the wanderer you told me about?” She points to flaxen-haired Jennet, hugging her smiling supporters.

  “Yeah.” Harkness sees a bearded young man next to her and the annealed end of his missing finger starts to ache. Mouse.

  “I want to talk to her,” Candace says.

  “Right behind you.”

  As they barge through the crowd, a couple of sharp elbows poke them.

  “Cut it out.” Harkness moves closer to Candace like a bodyguard.

  By the time they get near Jennet, she’s surrounded by her posse of earnest, bearded young men, though Mouse isn’t among them. Candace walks up to her. “I want you to have these.” She fishes in her jacket pocket and finds a set of keys. “My father died last year and we haven’t got around to selling his house. It’s a big one—you can probably put like a dozen people in it. It’s two seventy-five Oaktree Court.”

  “Thanks so much.” While the two are entwined in a sisterly hug, Jennet stares over Candace’s shoulder at Harkness for a long moment, her gaze laden with an indecipherable emotion, until Candace breaks free to talk to a high-school classmate.

  Jennet walks slowly toward Harkness, green eyes fixed.

  “You must be surprised about the vote,” he says.

  Jennet shrugs. “People doing the right thing shouldn’t ever be a surprise.” She reaches out to lay her hand on Harkness’s shoulder, then lets it slide away. She leans closer. “I have to talk to you,” she says.

  “You have my card,” Harkness says.

  “It’s private,” she says.

  “Shouldn’t be.”

  A baby-faced reporter from Nagog Journal sidles up and starts interviewing Jennet. “How do you feel about the vote? Does this mean more wanderers?” Jennet gives Harkness an exasperated look and starts cobbling together quotable answers.