Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  “Looks like a waffle iron,” Harkness says. “But after that, who knows? That’s part of the fun. Could be anything.”

  “I’m going to check it out,” she says. “Hold May?”

  “Sure.”

  Harkness watches as Candace takes her place at the ice table, in the front, right where he needs her. At the end waits a group of wanderers ready to claim all the items the Nagogians don’t want. Good luck with that, Harkness thinks. Almost everything is useful to a thrifty Yankee. These are people who buy week-old bread, reuse gift wrap, and burn foraged sticks in their fireplaces.

  The gaggle of wanderers gets the stink eye from wary Nagogians. Wanderer fatigue is setting in among even their most committed supporters. Over the holidays there was a fire in a carriage house on Main Street, and a fight broke out in a home office in West Nagog. A banner hanging near the mulled-cider hut reminds everyone that a special town meeting is scheduled for January 15, when the fate of the wanderers will be decided.

  Harkness gets in line with May perched on his shoulders. A set of free weights, a case of local apple wine, a Kindle, and assorted household odds and ends get shoved down the ice, generating varying degrees of enthusiasm from the takers crowded along the edges.

  When he gets to the front of the line, Harkness puts May gently in the wooden crate and hands her the ring box. They’ve been practicing for this morning every day for weeks. May breaks out in a big grin. “Mama?” she says.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Harkness pauses, then gives May a gentle push. As she glides slowly down the ramp, even the crustiest of Swamp Yankees have to smile. She’s emitting a supersonic squeal of glee as she slides along, one hand waving frantically, the other clutching the ring box.

  When May coasts by Candace, she pulls her daughter toward her, confused.

  Then May hands her the ring box.

  When Candace clicks it open, Harkness shouts from the front of the table, “Will you marry me, Candace Hammond?”

  There’s chaos, laughter, applause. The Ice Swap has seen many strange items sliding down its ice table—a four-hundred-pound soapstone sink, eighty years of National Geographics, and an exer-bike with a spandex-clad exer-girl sitting on it. But never a marriage proposal delivered via toddler-gram.

  While Candace closes her eyes for a moment, the crowd runs through its collective memory. That both of their fathers killed themselves seems like a strange coincidence. They remember Harkness’s mother as a popular schoolteacher and principal who supposedly had an affair with the local chief of police. She’s demented now, someone whispers. And Eddy Harkness? He was the captain of the Nagog High baseball team. Took the Minutemen to two state championships—the trophies are still in the high school’s display case. That boy went to Harvard! Became a Boston cop and got in some kind of trouble after a Sox game. Didn’t he end up emptying the parking meters around here for a while? He shut down that drug lab in the Old Nagog Tavern. That was all over the news.

  They turn their minds to Candace, the town’s punky misfit. They remember the horrific plane crash. Imagine waking up in a field, all cut to pieces, your sister and mother dead. Her time at the Nagog Bakery isn’t forgotten either. She was terrible. A one-handed waitress, imagine that!

  Beyond these memories, the townspeople see two of Nagog’s own in love, ready to start down the sliding slope of life together, letting hope outweigh fear. The crowd begins to clap and cheer, slowly at first, then louder, until May presses her hands over her ears, and Candace waves at them all to be quiet.

  “Yes, Eddy Harkness! Yes!” Candace takes the ring and slips it deftly on her finger. May claps.

  “But what do you give for it?” A shout from the crowd, then another. “What’s your offer?”

  Candace turns to look at Harkness and the crowd of Nagogians quiets. “All that I have.” She swipes a hand at the tears running down her pale face. “I hope it’s enough.”

  The applause and shouts from the crowd tell her that it is.

  32

  “WE’VE BEEN HERE since seven in the morning, Eddy.” Glenn looks up from the stacks of documents and books on the green worktable.

  Esther raises her head slowly from the table. “How long was I sleeping?”

  Glenn lays his hand gently on the back of her neck. “Just a few minutes, honey,” he says.

  “I dreamed about a giant squid,” she says. “It had us cornered in a sea cave.”

  “That squid’s your mean boss.” Glenn points at Harkness. “The one who refuses to let us leave.”

  “We’ll leave when we find what we’re looking for,” Harkness says. “And I resent that squid remark.”

  “Squid are highly intelligent invertebrates.” Esther pulls her rust-colored cardigan around her.

  Shadows pass by the frosted workroom window. “See?” Glenn says. “Everyone else is leaving.”

  “But you’re allowed to stay late, right?”

  “Until midnight, Eddy.” Glenn holds up the ID tag hanging from the lanyard around his neck. “Then I turn back into a pumpkin. I won’t be a curator anymore. I’ll just be another unemployed guy with a PhD.”

  “You’ll always be a librarian to me,” Esther says.

  Glenn smiles. “I guess that’s good.”

  “We have a few more hours.” Harkness turns back to his pages from the Boston city charter, more than a hundred pages long. They’ve split it into thirds to review every line.

  “Yeah, but we’re done, Eddy. Totally done.” They’ve gone through dozens of city documents looking for any possible justification for ousting the mayor. But every lead they find circles back to the same hard fact—the mayor makes all the decisions and holds all the power.

  “Not yet.” Harkness walks over to the side table, littered with empty coffee cups, wadded-up paper bags, and sandwich wrappers. He lifts the Dunkin’ Donuts Box o’ Joe, intended to keep an office caffeinated all day. They’ve drained it. He shrugs, sits back down at the worktable.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be tracking drug dealers down and busting them?”

  “It’s good to be flexible,” Harkness says. He holds up his stack of printouts. “I got to say, this doesn’t sound particularly ye olde Boston-y.”

  “This is like the King James Version of the Boston city charter,” Glenn says. “A mayoral task force put together a more citizen-friendly version in . . .” He pages through his notes. “In 1947.”

  Harkness thinks, summons up what he knows about Boston’s mayors, glorious and (more often) notorious. “That would be the final term of Mayor James Michael Curley, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Harkness feels the hair on his arms rise. “Is the original still here at the library?”

  “It’s in the vault in the Rare Books Room.”

  “Know the combination?”

  “No, but I know where it is.”

  “Go get the old charter, okay?”

  “Eddy, the original charter is a badly deteriorating book-length document from the late nineteenth century,” Glenn says.

  “Ooo,” Esther says. “Sounds cool. Go get it, Glenn.”

  “We’re not going to go through all of it,” Harkness says. “Just most of it.”

  Glenn lowers his head to the worktable and moans.

  “Hold on, right there.” Harkness looks up from the worktable.

  Esther’s reading the original charter aloud as Harkness compares it to the 1947 version. Two hours after they started, they’re up to the Declaration of Rights.

  “Read that last part again.”

  Glenn’s wearing white conservator’s gloves, carefully turning each page of the fragile green book on the table, cleared and cleaned now, as Esther reads out loud:

  In order to prevent those who are vested with authority from becoming oppressors, the people have a right to cause their public officials to return to private life by a unanimous vote of the city’s elected councilors, who can file a Bill of Address to remove said of
ficial. They shall fill up vacant offices by temporary appointments, followed swiftly by regular elections

  .

  Harkness points to a section in the 1947 charter. “That part isn’t in my version, Glenn.”

  “Sure it is. Let me take a look.” Glenn carries the book gingerly over to Harkness’s side of the worktable. He looks at the original document, then the modern one.

  “Shit,” he says. “It’s not there.”

  Harkness opens his notebook and makes a careful copy of the full text of the missing section, 17D.

  “That Curley guy was a real weasel,” Esther says.

  “By 1947, Curley had already been thrown in prison for fraud,” Glenn says. “Got pardoned by Truman, but he was struggling to hold on to power. Genius politician, but brutal and corrupt. Like Whitey and Billy Bulger rolled into one.”

  “He definitely wouldn’t want the city council to have that kind of power.” Harkness closes his notebook and puts it in his jacket pocket. “No mayor would.”

  “Like an electoral sword of Damocles,” Glenn says. “You manage to squeak out a mayoral win, then you can get voted out by the city council, filled with pissed-off pols you’ve screwed over.” Glenn looks at the clause again. “So Mayor Curley’s crew just edited out this part and no one bothered to compare. Until now.”

  “How could anyone?” Harkness stands and circles the table, taking his leather jacket from its hook. “The original was locked in the vault of the Boston Public Library.”

  “Which is controlled by the mayor and his cronies,” Glenn says.

  “And still is.” Harkness breaks into a broad smile. Now that they’ve found the nail, their study group is over.

  Glenn carefully closes the original city charter and puts it back in its slipcase, stamped in tarnished gold with the city seal. He peels off his white gloves and opens a lower drawer, pulling out a dusty bottle of red wine and a corkscrew. “Been saving this bottle for a night like tonight,” he says. “It’s an ’82 Pavillon Rouge. And guess who gave it to me?”

  “No idea,” Harkness says.

  “It came from the personal wine cellar of Robert Fayerwether IV.” He pops the cork and reaches down to get glasses.

  “You two nerdy lovebirds go ahead,” Harkness says. “Much as I’d like to savor the irony, and the wine, I have to head home. Got some e-mails to write.”

  “It’s like we’re sending out a baby announcement,” Esther says with a broad and goofy smile. “Congratulations, it’s a nail!”

  It’s cold, but Harkness walks home to the seaport to clear his head after a long day in the library. Late on a January night, the city seems to be hibernating, people huddled in dark bars and warm restaurants, waiting for the thaw. Downtown Crossing looks like an abandoned stage set, gray snow piled high.

  His phone vibrates and he takes it out of his pocket. The text is from an old number, one he recognizes instantly.

  Some bald fk named Birch an his buds are talkin sht bout u in my bar.

  Wnt me to dose hm?

  Back at the Zero Room, Thalia used to pour triples, hide an extra shot of Everclear in a whiskey sour, dissolve a Valium in a vodka tonic. Dosing the enemy was her way of getting even, of making bad customers suffer by pushing them over the edge until they passed out, did something embarrassing, or got their asses kicked.

  As much as he’d like to see Neil Burch dosed into a coma, Harkness just puts his phone in his pocket. Thalia sidling back into his life isn’t what he needs now.

  When Harkness cuts left down Kingston Street he hears a familiar voice chanting along over drums and bass.

  We don’t care.

  Democracy can’t catch us.

  We don’t care.

  It’s from Mayor O’Mara’s amped-up speech at the Harbormasters’ party, sampled and mixed on top of a dubstep track, making his voice sound creepy and disembodied, like it’s coming from space. Or an old Thievery Corporation album. Except it’s coming from the sound system at Fitzy’s, little sonic bites escaping into the cold streets every time the bar door opens.

  “Jack,” Harkness says. “Unbelievable.” Patrick sent the audio file of O’Mara’s speech to journalists and bloggers, who used it as proof that the mayor was just another out-of-touch rich businessman, no real surprises there. Harkness e-mailed it to Jack, formerly of the Jackals, and asked him to spread it to all his musician friends and studio rats at Raw Power. It was a long shot. But in a city full of musicians, smart-asses, and college radio stations, he figured something good might come of it.

  Now it has.

  Harkness’s surreptitious audio has been carefully edited to turn an off-the-cuff comment about O’Mara’s nimble administration into a damning against-the-people boast:

  Democracy can’t catch up to us.

  It’s not exactly his kind of music but it sounds pretty good. Harkness keeps walking down Kingston Street, O’Mara’s voice fading with every snowy step.

  33

  ANTHONY INCAGNOLI RUSHES toward the door when they walk into the interrogation room, but his ankle chains slow him down. Patrick puts an arm out to block Anthony, then shoves him back.

  “What is this shit, man?” Specks of spit blow from his wide-open, contorted mouth. If he weren’t handcuffed, he’d be swinging at them. “I got a right to call my lawyer. You got any idea who I am?”

  “We know exactly who you are,” Harkness says.

  “You look like an FIA to me.” Patrick gives him a hard push toward a metal chair. “That’s a Future Inmate of America, case you didn’t know.”

  “We’re giving you a few minutes to save yourself,” Harkness says. “Or you can be all up in our face and just stay in lockup until you cool down.”

  “Fuck you, man,” he says. “You got nothing on me.”

  Patrick holds up an iPhone. “We downloaded your life, and it looks pretty shady and druggy.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Here’s a little security tip,” Patrick says. “Next time, don’t use your birthday as your password.”

  Anthony starts to rise out of his chair and Patrick shoves him back. “We can cuff you to the chair,” he says, “or just keep it civilized-like.”

  Anthony settles. Harkness nods at Patrick, who gives him one last menacing look before he slams the door.

  “That nigger’s an asshole,” Anthony mutters.

  Harkness’s right hand flies out, grabs Anthony’s long black hair, and slams his forehead down on the metal desk.

  Anthony screams.

  Harkness lifts his head up and slams it back down again. So much for civilized.

  “Stop it, man!”

  The duty officer’s face appears in the holding room’s tiny window. He shakes his head—enough with the shamrock justice.

  Harkness waves his free hand. Everything’s under control. An emphatic conversation, that’s all.

  “No N-word, ever again. We’re post-racial here. Got it?” He pushes Anthony’s shivering, sweaty face into the desk to enhance retention of this life lesson.

  “Aw right, aw right, poft rafel.” Anthony nods as much as someone with his face pressed down on a desk can.

  Harkness lets him go, wipes his hand on his black jeans, and stalks around the room for a minute to settle. He circles back, sits down in a metal chair, and takes a good look across the table at Anthony. Long black hair pulled back, olive skin, tight gray leather motocross jacket, baggy jeans, unlaced boots. He looks like a North End action figure, the kind of handsome guy who might spend his evenings selling Xanax to college girls from his sidewalk table at Café Amalfi. He’s a dead ringer for young Joey Ink, now an elder statesman in the city’s overcrowded pantheon of notorious felons.

  “You got a lot of explaining to do, Anthony.” Harkness holds up a clipboard with a couple of photos and printouts on the top and blank paper underneath for credibility. “We pulled your fingerprint from a Dark Horse paper found at the scene of a double overdose at Harvard last week. And we’ve
got your texts with one of the deceased, a guy named Jason Kittredge. Ring a bell?”

  “No,” he says. “Don’t know any Harvard kids.”

  “Jason looked like this.” Harkness flips a printout of Jason’s Harvard ID onto the desk.

  “Don’t remember him.”

  “Met him at McCloskey’s?”

  “Got nothing, man.”

  “Doesn’t matter, really,” Harkness says. “You’re going to get charged with two counts of homicide this time, not dealing like before. We think your texts show that you knew Dark Horse was pure, but you sold it low anyway. To people you knew were going to die.”

  “Whoa,” Anthony says, shaking his head. “Way whoa. Wicked way whoa. You cannot fucking pin that on me. I just sell drugs—I mean, hyperthetically. It’s not like I kill fucking people.”

  Harkness stares. “The two Harvard kids pushed last year’s OD count over a thousand, in case you’re keeping score.”

  “I mean, what if the mailman delivers some kinda bomb in a package. Like a dirty bomb with anthrax all over it? It kills the person who gets the package. But is it the fucking mailman’s fault? I think not.”

  “Gee, Anthony, what a refreshing perspective,” Harkness says. “I guess we should quit bothering the good people like you who sell drugs. It’s really the dead people’s fault.”

  “Damn straight.”

  In a way, Harkness knows he’s right. If Jason, Therese, and thousands of others didn’t want to escape their earthy woes for a few hours, there wouldn’t be any Anthony Incagnolis around to make it happen. Demand triggers supply.

  “Look, if I knew that Dark Horse was such over-the-top kick-ass shit, again hyperthetically, of course, I woulda stomped all over it. That’s just good business.”

  “Appreciate the insight.”

  “So what I’m saying is, it makes sense to let me out on low bail,” Anthony says. “Like soon.”