I shushed him, glancing up to the second floor, where Clay’s room was. Nick moved closer to me, lowered his voice.
“Winley Minnow’s built like a double-wide and he was buzzed this morning,” he said. “That shit is strong. What happens if someone like Marni gets ahold of it? She’s maybe a hundred pounds dripping wet.”
I turned away. Nick was talking like a man who’d already gotten on the train and taken his seat and was beckoning to me through the window as the gears began to grind. I couldn’t leave him to wander into a situation by himself, hypervigilant and ready to fight whether there was a battle to be won or not.
Gloucester was not my city, but it had been Siobhan’s. My wife had dreamed of running a hotel by the sea since she was a little girl, and she didn’t have the time before she was taken to really enjoy what she had built. I knew that at the moment, I was staring into the blood and bone and muscle of a new town with new people to protect. It was a familiar feeling. I was not a cop anymore, but I could throw myself into this mission and become a part of Gloucester, let it take me up into its heart, fight for it. The feeling of having something to love and protect the way I had Boston made the hairs on my arms stand up. No, I decided. Nobody would prey on the kids of this town. Not while I was standing guard.
“It’s up to us,” Nick said.
“It’s up to us,” I agreed.
CHAPTER TEN
I WALKED DOWN the hall and saw Marni sitting on the steps, a cigarette clamped between her lips, tuning her violin. Marni had stopped going to school about the time she moved in with Siobhan and me, but she hadn’t given up the violin. Music was the only subject she hadn’t been failing. I tried to avoid Marni completely, even when Siobhan was alive, having exactly zero experience in the emotional requirements of volatile, vulnerable teen girls. I was aware that, now that Siobhan was gone, Marni was kind of my responsibility. But I’d become a master at ignoring my responsibilities.
I was about to make the girl aware of my presence when she finished tuning the violin, placed it under her chin, and played a few notes I recognized from one of Chopin’s nocturnes. I’ve always wanted to tell Marni that she’s a gifted musician. She plays only sad stuff, and sometimes I hear her practicing and just the sound of it tears me to shreds inside. But telling a teenager a thing like that could make her pitch the instrument into the sea and never play again. I stood in the hall and listened, my throat tight and my fists clenched, until she stopped to adjust something else. I crept away and then walked back down the hall loudly and sat on the stairs beside her.
“Here he is,” she said, the cigarette moving as she talked. “Mr. Freeze.”
“Mr. Freeze?”
“The guy with the cold, dead heart.”
“I see.” I folded my arms. “You think I didn’t appreciate the little thing you organized this morning for Siobhan.”
“You sprinted off like someone was shooting at you.”
“I had to help a friend,” I said. “But I appreciated it. I just grieve differently than you. I’m not a ‘Let’s all get together and hug it out’ kind of griever, Marn.”
“Yeah, you’re a ‘Keep pushing it down until it rises up and explodes’ kind of griever,” she said. “That’s healthy.”
“I congratulate you on your career choice of psychologist,” I said. “Fifteen might be a bit young to get licensed, but I’m sure your professional colleagues will make an exception in your case.”
“Did you come here just to annoy me?” she asked.
“I want to know if you’ve had anyone approach you with one of these.” I took out the capsule with the smiley face and showed it to her. She examined it and then made like she was going to throw it into her mouth. She started laughing when I grabbed it back.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“You’re too easy.”
“Have you seen one of these before or not?”
“No, I have not. Why are you asking? Are you the new drug police in Gloucester? And here I was, thinking you’d reached peak lameness. ‘Just say no to the drugs, Marni.’” She crossed her eyes and said in a stupid, lisping voice, “Drugs are bad, m’kay?”
“Now who’s being annoying?”
“Of course there are drugs around.” She looked away. “Gloucester’s not the moon. There’s weed. The boys in the kitchen at work huff nitrous oxide from the whipped-cream cans we use on desserts sometimes. Whip-its. You ever done a whip-it?”
“No. I like my brain cells too much.”
“Well, the boss caught them, so they’ve mostly stopped now. But I don’t blame them. There’s nothing to do here. How the hell are we supposed to spend our free time?”
I knew exactly how Marni spent her free time, and it was worrying enough without the drugs. She fit right in with a posse of similarly badly dressed mopey teens who had body parts dripping with piercings or crisscrossed with free tattoos they got from local apprentices practicing in their mothers’ garages. From what I could tell, they did the kind of things I did when I was their age. Smashed the windows of abandoned houses. Sat around campfires on the beach talking trash. Threw bottles off the break wall into the water. Kids who, in a couple of years, would either straighten right out or flush their futures gleefully down the toilet.
“I’m not talking weed and whip-its,” I told her. “I’m talking about the hard stuff. This here?” I showed her the capsule. “This did about ten thousand bucks’ worth of damage to a lady’s house this morning and almost got me a kitchen knife in my forehead.”
“I don’t know anything about it, man.” Marni waved me off. “I work at a pizza shop. Everybody there is on something. How do you think they don’t go nuts with the sheer mindlessness of it all?” She stuck her chin out, made sleepy eyes. “Thin crust. No anchovies. Double cheese. Thin crust. No anchovies. Double—”
“Not you, though, right?”
“Oh, of course not.” She rolled her eyes. I got an itchy, unsettled feeling in my chest. I wanted to come down hard on Marni, tell her all the things Siobhan would have told her if she were alive: that she was too smart to spend the rest of her life wearing a Dough Brothers uniform by day and wasting her time with losers and washouts at night. But I knew too much of that would only push her away. I decided I would keep a closer eye on her, even if I had to do it covertly. Marni was on the edge, and the smallest breath of wind could blow her into a dark place. I had to keep a grip on Siobhan’s little cousin.
“Well, then, I suppose if you’ve never bought any drugs, you don’t know how to call up for some,” I said, pulling the piece of paper with the phone number out of my pocket. Marni looked at the number with interest, then her big eyes flicked back to me, suspicious.
“I need someone with a young voice,” I said. “You ever take a drama class?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BOY WAS sitting on a wooden ledge outside Dogtown Used and Unusual Books, watching the crowds go by and sucking on a lollipop. A section of Gloucester’s main road had been shut down for a street festival, and the curb was lined with carts selling lobster rolls, corn dogs, and ice cream. There were photography stalls selling sunset shots of the boats in the harbor. Nick and I observed the skinny kid in oversize clothes as we stood behind a stand selling nautical antiques, the jumble of polished brass navigation equipment and salt-encrusted buoys providing cover. Marni was casually flipping through tiles painted with colorful starfish on the counter of the stall. She glanced over at the boy when we pointed him out.
“Oh, him?” She laughed. “Can’t be him. That’s Squid. I went to school with that guy.”
“Makes sense,” Nick said. “Get a kid to deal to kids. He can walk among them without standing out.”
“Why do you say it can’t be him?” I asked Marni.
“Because Squid’s an idiot. He got expelled for putting a dead squid in the principal’s Lexus. The guy left his sunroof open. It was a hot day, too, and he didn’t get back out to his car until the afternoon.” Marni smi
rked. “I wonder how much it cost him to get that reek out of his car.”
“Where did he get the squid?” Nick asked.
“Science class. It was marine-life week.”
“Send him a message,” I said, keeping my eyes on the boy. “He’s standing where the guy said he’d be. It’s got to be him.”
Marni took her phone out and texted, and we watched as the kid patted his jeans and then took a phone out of his pocket.
“It’s him. All right, get out of here,” I told Marni. “I’ll see you back at the house.”
“No way, man,” Marni whispered. “I want to watch.”
“I said move it.” I pointed to the end of the street. Marni sulked off, and Nick and I approached the skinny kid sitting in front of the bookstore. I felt like a bully walking up to the weedy nerd in the schoolyard. The boy looked almost emaciated, he was so thin. Nick could have cracked him over his knee as easily as a broom handle. But I knew that what he had been spreading around was dangerous, lethal stuff. I had to put a stop to it now, before this young man spread his product farther through the neighborhood.
As we got closer, I saw that there was a black backpack over his shoulder, wedged between the kid and the front window of the store.
“Hey, punk,” Nick started. I braced myself to take off in case the kid ran, but he just looked at Nick lazily.
“’Sup, bro?”
“What’s up is you’re peddling toxic shit to schoolkids.” I grabbed the boy’s backpack and lifted him to his feet with it. “You don’t do that in our town.”
“Your town?” Squid grinned, then shifted the lollipop from one cheek to the other. I could see that most of his teeth were black. “Who the fuck are you? You ain’t the police. What, you think you got the local operation around here?”
“No, we’re not drug-dealing scum like you.” Nick pushed the kid hard enough that he thumped into the glass of the bookstore window. It was an old trick. Never let the perp get his balance. “We want you out of here.”
“Oh, man.” Squid laughed. “You keep your hands off me, bro. You don’t know who you’re dealin’ with right now.”
“Oh, really?” I said.
Squid lifted his white T-shirt and dragged an enormous gun halfway out of the front of his jeans.
“Yeah,” the boy said. “Really, bitch.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE STREET WAS full of people. There were kids gathered around the ice cream stand, families looking in store windows, Marni watching curiously from the other side of the street, only two stalls down from where I’d left her. I saw a trumpet player on the corner, his instrument case open in the sun, heard the clatter of quarters as someone threw change onto the pile. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the noise around me. The gun was comically big in the kid’s hand; the tendons of his wrist strained as he flashed the butt at me.
I made a grab for the gun. He shoved at me with his other hand and tried to drag the pistol up above his belt.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
“Fuck you, man,” Squid snarled in my face. He raised his voice. “Get your hands off my dick, old man!”
I didn’t flinch. “You get your hands off the gun or I’ll blast your dick all over the pavement.”
Nick stepped in, shielding our struggle from the crowd. All we needed was for someone to spot the gun, start screaming, and cause a mass panic. The kid released the gun and I realized for the first time that every muscle in my body was frozen with terror. I pulled the weapon all the way out of his jeans and tucked it into my coat.
“Where the hell did you get a gun like that?” I eased a breath from my tight lungs. “What are you, fifteen years old? Who are you working for?”
“Doesn’t matter where I got the gun.” Squid sniffed, trying to act tough after I’d disarmed him. “I’ll have another one next time you come knocking. I see you again, I’m not gonna wait, bro. I’ll just start poppin’ at whoever’s around. You got that?”
He gestured with his chin at the crowd, at the children bouncing with excitement in the line for ice cream.
“Now let me go before I start screaming,” the boy said. “You ain’t the cops. All I gotta do is tell all these nice people here you got a big-ass gun and you’re stickin’ it in my face.”
People had stopped to stare. I backed off, and Squid walked away. Nick and I watched as Squid tried his best to swagger confidently through the crowd, sucking hard on his lollipop.
“I think Susan was right,” Nick said. “This is bigger than we thought.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I KNEW EXACTLY who killed my wife. In order to get to the bar where Nick and I planned to think through our problem, I had to drive past the house of the woman who’d killed Siobhan. Since the accident, I’ve felt a tightening in my stomach and a pressure on my brain every time I go by, but there was no way around it now. I gripped the steering wheel as we approached. Nick, his boots up on the dash, looked out the window on the passenger side.
Siobhan had been walking along the strip of grass by the side of the road when she was hit. She was on her way back from the grocery store, a trip she’d made a hundred times, something she enjoyed. She liked the chance to be alone and the little mission of going into town, checking things off her list, talking to people in the supermarket aisles, making connections. It had been a clear, crisp evening, the sun not yet behind the hills, kids riding their bikes in the street, and birds announcing their return home to their nests for the night. The contents of the bags in her hands ended up scattered all over the road, red wine and roast beef for a dinner we would never have.
Some things didn’t add up about what had happened to Siobhan. The young woman who had hit her, Monica Rink, had been driving to a party. She’d tested negative for alcohol and drugs after the accident, but in the footwell of the passenger side of the car, there’d been a six-pack of vodka coolers with two missing and one open. The road was isolated but dead straight. Monica had swerved a long way off the asphalt, somehow not seeing Siobhan on the wide strip of grass. The paramedics told me that Monica had been playing with her radio, unable to get the Bluetooth to connect to her phone. She rammed the car into a road barrier after she hit Siobhan and then got out and ran back to assist her. My wife died in a stranger’s arms while I was at home on the little porch, watching the purple light settle over the ocean and waiting for her.
I’d never spoken to Nick about my nervous, angry avoidance of Monica Rink’s house, but he seemed to get it.
“So I have a confession to make,” he said as we got closer to the house.
“Oh yeah?”
“The memorial this morning.” He leaned back in the seat. “Marni said Siobhan used to grab her and make her dance with her in the kitchen to her crappy music.”
“Mmm?”
“Well.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Siobhan might have made me do that a few times.”
“Really.” I looked over. He was smiling to himself.
“Maybe I didn’t fight her off so much,” Nick said.
“Did you dance close?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“How close?”
“Pretty close.” He grinned at me. I found I was grinning too, for some reason.
“One time she made me sing the Kenny Rogers parts of ‘Islands in the Stream,’” he said.
I laughed hard. “You’re just a man,” I said. “What could you do?”
Our smiles faded. When I looked over, Nick’s face had darkened. I was steeling myself to pass Monica Rink’s house when Nick suddenly put a hand out.
“Pull over,” he ordered.
I drove the car onto the shoulder. In the woods, a man with a dark beard and long hair was walking his dog, his eyes on the fallen leaves at his feet. Nick got out of the car and went to the rear tire. I leaned over and watched him in the side mirror as he pretended to examine the tire, then took out his phone and snapped a picture of the man with the dog over his shoulder.
“What the hell was that?”
“That dude.” Nick was ducking his head to watch the man disappear in mirror as we drove away. “That’s the third time this month I’ve seen him near the house.”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I’ve seen him around. That’s Living the Dream.”
“Who?”
“I’ve spoken to him a couple of times. I just say, ‘Hello, how are you?’” I said. “He always says, ‘Living the dream.’”
“What does that mean?” Nick said, almost to himself. He was typing something into his phone. I glanced over and saw there was a list of times and dates, pictures of the bearded man. “Living the dream?”
I waited for Nick to tell me he was joking. He didn’t.
“Nick, he’s just a dude walking his dog.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “That’s what it’s supposed to look like. Just like that mother with her baby.”
One of Nick’s grisly tales from his time in Iraq was what he referred to as the Mother-Baby Story. His battalion had been traversing the desert from their base camp outside Alqosh to a small town called Jambur, moving supplies. Blistering sunlight, featureless sandy plains so wide you could see the curvature of the Earth. The lead vehicle had stopped when a middle-aged woman in a niqab ran out of a house in the desert waving her arms and crying, calling for assistance. With the soldiers’ guns trained on the woman, the unit’s interpreter had determined that a baby had stopped breathing inside the little house. The captain gave permission for two armed guys, the interpreter, and a medic to go assess the situation while the rest of the battalion remained where they were in the convoy. The four members of the team hadn’t even shut the door behind them when the house exploded, spraying the convoy with dust and debris.
Thinking about Nick’s Mother-Baby Story had made me forget completely that I was approaching the house of the woman responsible for Siobhan’s death. I realized with relief that the house was now behind us, but the relief was short-lived. Nick’s surveillance of Living the Dream and his dog was leading to an episode.
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