I had seen Nick fall victim to this before, when the mind that was so ravaged by his time in the service inched too far across the sanity line into dark territory and he was suddenly back there on the tour, where people were not who they seemed to be and any moment could be shattered by violent deaths. The bomb of Nick’s terrifying hidden memories had been ticking for a while now, and there was no telling when it was going to blow.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
VIOLENCE WAS ABOUT to break out at the Greenfish Bar.
Nick and I took the short end of the counter and I saw him right away, an old man tearing a cardboard coaster to shreds over a quarter glass of whiskey. His shoulders were up around his ears and his jaw was flexing, and I could see what remained of the muscles in his neck twitching. He was looking away from me and Nick at a group of men celebrating what seemed to be someone’s return. A skinny, pockmarked shrimp of a guy at the center of the group kept getting pats on the back and comments on his body, the men busting his balls about his lean arms.
While Nick was in the bathroom, the shrimpy guy walked down the bar and ordered a drink, leaning in a little too close to the elderly whiskey drinker.
“I’m catching those death stares you’re throwing my way, old man,” the shrimp said. The old man flinched. “Keep it up. It doesn’t bother me. I’m gonna have a few drinks here with my buddies, and then I’m going home to my wife. We’re trying to have another baby.”
The shrimp pushed the old guy’s drink over. It spilled and ran off the edge of the bar. The bartender rolled her eyes and poured the old man another while the shrimp walked away.
I don’t make it my business to get involved in bar fights, but I recognized the old guy. He had stood over Siobhan’s body in the medical examiner’s office the night I lost her. I’d been called in to identify her, and he’d put a hand on my back, warm and heavy. It had felt like the only thing keeping me from floating off and becoming nothing, that hand on my shoulder. The mere sight of Dr. Eric Mayburn now stole my breath away. Siobhan was everywhere. Inescapable.
Nick came back and ordered drinks for us, then slid an elbow out on the bar and surveyed the Greenfish’s sticky laminated menu. Lobster rolls and Jack Daniel’s–flavored hot wings.
“So here’s the plan,” Nick said. “We take the gun to Susan. Get her to run the serial number. I’m guessing whoever the jerk is, if he isn’t just some poor sap who’s had his gun stolen, he’s the kingpin and he gave the gun to Squid. We get the address and go around there, threaten him with what we know. He’s supplied a deadly weapon to a minor. He won’t want his house raided. He’ll move on.”
“I have a few problems with what you’re saying,” I said. “First, Susan doesn’t want to help us. She avoids anything that has to do with the Bureau.”
“I can’t work that woman out,” Nick said. “What’s she doing at the house? Why tell us she used to be Bureau if she’s not willing to tell us everything—what she did there, why she left. She’s too young to have retired. Maybe she got herself kicked out and she’s blacklisted.”
I shifted in my seat. Nick was wandering into territory that was dangerously familiar to me.
“Maybe she’s undercover, working on something,” Nick mused. “But then why tell us she used to be a fed at all? Maybe it’s all lies. Maybe she was supposed to marry a guy with Mob ties but left him at the altar.”
“You’re very creative,” I noted. “But whatever it is, I’m sure it’s none of our business. In any case, we have to decide what we’re going to do with this big-ass gun. Maybe we should take it to Clay.”
“What do you need a handgun that size in Gloucester for?” Nick said. “You know, I came to Gloucester to get away from guns, sirens, and crackheads. The fact that these creeps are handing out samples means they’re new in town, trying to lock in some long-term clientele. We stomp on them now and we won’t have ourselves another Baltimore.”
Nick was a Baltimore native, but he’d told me when he moved in here that he had returned to his city to find it worse than some of the war-torn villages he’d rolled through in Iraq. A drug epidemic had ravaged Baltimore, and its overcrowded rehab clinics, overwhelmed cops, and warring gangs had given it a dangerous reputation. Nick left for Gloucester after an elderly woman was beaten to death in the hallway of his apartment building for her handbag. He’d found her lying there stone-cold dead, the other residents too scared to dial 911 for fear of being called on as witnesses.
“Nothing like Baltimore is going to happen,” I said. “Not here.”
“You’re damn right it’s not,” he said. “So give me your plan.”
“My plan for right now is to try to stop this train before it leaves the station,” I said, watching Dr. Mayburn. Nick followed my glance. I was surprised he hadn’t caught on to the danger already, but once he did, he sat bolt upright. Dr. Mayburn had risen out of his seat and seemed on the edge of making a bad decision about the loud, annoying group at the end of the bar. He took a steak knife from a place setting on the counter and held it by his side, moving the blade up and down.
“I wouldn’t do it, friend,” Nick said, sipping his drink. Dr. Mayburn was shaking with rage as he turned to us.
“Do what?” he snapped.
“It’s not worth it,” Nick said. “They’re just loud losers. Ignore them.”
Mayburn was walking toward them even before Nick finished speaking. Nick and I rounded the bar to intervene just as Dr. Mayburn thrust himself into the group, brandishing the knife at the small, lean man, whose expression was a mixture of surprise and delight.
“I’ve had enough,” Mayburn said, sneering. “I’ve had enough of you and your filth. You remorseless … cowardly … ” His rage was making it impossible for him to find the right words. “Having another baby, are you? You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Nick and I went in to pull Mayburn back but we were stopped by the thick arm of one of the men in the group; it came down in front of us like a tollbooth barrier. Someone shoved Mayburn in the back, almost toppling him, but he got his balance and flailed around with the knife, inches from bewildered faces.
“What you gonna do, you old prick?”
“Go for it, bitch. Let’s see what you’ve got!”
The men had the knife out of Mayburn’s withered grip before he even realized it. They started pushing him around like a child. Nick glanced at me, and I could almost feel his body engage, harden, go into fight mode. A switch flipped, and the machine was unleashed.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
NICK GRABBED THE arm blocking him and yanked it down, then used the momentum to drag the big guy to the floor and sink a knee into his ribs as he went. I heard bones crunch. I thought about the gun in my pocket but grabbed the wrist of the guy with the knife instead and palmed him in the face with my other hand; the shock of the blow caused him to drop the knife. I slid it to the side with my foot, pushed Mayburn out of harm’s way, grabbed one of the losers by his flannel shirt, and threw him into the bar, knocking stools over. Nick and I backed the remaining trio into the corner by the men’s room.
“He came at us, the asshole!” The shrimpy guy gestured at Mayburn while keeping an eye on Nick, who stepped over the big guy he’d winded like he was a deer shot down in the woods. “We’re just trying to have a party here!”
“The party’s moving on.” I pointed to the doors to the parking lot. “Better catch the bus before it leaves.”
The little guy had a chest full of swirly tattoos peeking through his sweat-stained shirt. There were rosy red sores around his throat from a cheap razor. His friends seemed happy to leave, edging toward the door, but it was the shrimp’s party and he wasn’t giving up without a tantrum. He grabbed a glass from the table behind him and threw it at me.
I wasn’t ready for that and I flinched, but Nick caught the glass an inch from my nose and then smashed it on the countertop, leaving a jagged edge to fight with. I imagined myself doing the same thing but ending up with a fistful of
useless shards. Nick didn’t even have to brandish the weapon. The big guy dragged himself up, and the party of losers walked out. There was a promise in the shrimp’s eyes as he glanced back over his shoulder at Mayburn.
The doctor was clutching his chest and gasping as he went to the bar. I helped him onto a stool while Nick went to smooth things over with the bartender before she called the cops.
Mayburn was not a fighting man. His face and neck were flushed, and his hands were shaking. I felt him examining my face.
“Don’t I know you?” Mayburn asked.
“Nope,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I think I’d remember a crazy old-timer who goes around waving knives at punks in bars,” I said. I took the stool beside him, showing him only my profile. “You know that guy, do you?”
“That small one. That’s Rick Craft.”
“Who’s Rick Craft?”
“Google it,” he said, too tired to explain.
I took out my phone as Mayburn recovered. The story I read from the Gloucester Chronicle, the newspaper Susan worked for, made the hairs on my neck stand up.
“‘Two girls, ages three and five, were taken to Lawrence General Hospital in North Andover for suspected poisoning,’” I read. “‘They were pronounced dead on arrival.’”
“They weren’t poisoned,” Mayburn said. “They were Craft’s kids. He’s a long-term addict. Rick and his wife got high and passed out. Left a bunch of pills on the table. The girls took one each, thinking they were candy.”
Nick returned to my side as Mayburn collected himself.
“I’m the medical examiner at Lawrence,” Mayburn said, something I knew but Nick didn’t. “I was there when the girls were brought in. The pills they took were loaded with fentanyl. It’s fifty times more potent than heroin. They never had a chance.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“That bastard”—Mayburn jerked a thumb at the door through which Craft and his cronies had left—“did just ninety days in prison. Pleaded to child endangerment. Ninety days. Can you believe that? I saw the pictures from his house. There were needles all over the floor. He gets child endangerment? It should have been murder.”
Mayburn wiped his face with his hand. I now understood his distress at Craft’s claims that he and his wife were trying for another child. I felt the rage rising fiery and hard, like a heated steel ball stuck in my throat.
“The drugs even looked like candy,” Mayburn said almost to himself, staring into his glass, defeated. “The capsules were bright and colorful with faces printed on them.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CLINE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND it. Gloucester was crawling with seafood. Every morning he suited up head to toe in Nike and ran along the empty gray beach, and everywhere there were crab, lobster, and tuna boats returning from predawn runs. He saw the slippery black heads and flippers in the boats’ wake, seals that trailed the vessels for scraps and throwbacks. And yet despite that, there was only this one sushi place in town, and it was a dump.
He sat at the windows of the restaurant with his men, gazing at the fading light on the water, his nose wrinkling at the smell from the kitchen. Unchanged industrial fryers, the tang of tartar sauce and lemon. The wine, at least, was passable. He’d certainly been less comfortable than this for much longer in his life.
Attempting to spread the business in the north, Cline had done all he could to make himself comfortable in seaside Shitsville until he could get boys on every corner, a morgue full of bodies, a police force under his thumb, and a steady population of clients buying his product. As soon as Cline was satisfied, he would be out of here, taking the virus north to cities that better suited his tastes. He had his eye on Portland next. There was great sushi in Portland.
Town by town, higher and higher, Cline planned to spread his business. He was building a franchise. He established control of a town, trained his managers, handed over the reins, and then moved on. Gloucester was a prize Cline had wanted for quite a while. It was untouched territory. Terra nullius. A couple of times in Boston, Cline had had to squash local competition and deal with the problems they’d left behind. Resentful cops who were impossible to bend. Burned politicians and judges. Old junkies with high tolerances who couldn’t be fed economical, low-percentage product. But Gloucester would be Cline’s jewel. His chance to establish things just the way he liked. He’d thought about opening a sushi place here, just to make it tolerable.
Someone shouted something, interrupting a brief by his man Turner that he’d hardly been listening to, and when Cline looked up, he saw a furious late-middle-aged white woman leaving her table and coming over to their booth. One of the locals, he assumed, judging by the stretched neck of her Walmart T-shirt, the bottle dye job, the eighties ice-blue eye shadow. Cline sipped his wine, steeling himself.
“You.” The woman pointed across the table at him, ignoring Russ, Turner, and Bones. “I know who you are.”
The woman was spitting as she talked. Cline glanced at the table from whence she’d come and saw the remains of battered-shrimp cocktails, wilted salads. A beer-bellied man cowering in embarrassment and a toddler in a filthy high chair smearing itself and everything within reach with ketchup.
“My daughter goes to your people for oxy,” the woman said. “She’s twenty-one. Kaylen Druly. Do you know her? I bet you don’t know any of their names. Her wrists are like this. Like this!” Cline watched the woman make a circle with her fingers about the circumference of a golf ball. “I haven’t seen or heard from my daughter in two weeks. I’m raising her son because of you. Did you know that? I’m sixty-three years old!”
Russ and Bones were out of the booth, pushing the woman and swearing, but she struggled with them, knocked Cline’s glass of sauvignon blanc into his lap. Cold rushed over his shirt, his thighs; the chilled wine reached into his jock and sent icy fingers around his balls. Cline stood, dabbing at the fabric. He had a huge stain, like he had pissed his pants. A couple of waiters entered the fray. People were leaning out of their booths, pointing, whispering.
“They brought their poison into this town!” the woman howled.
It was a good performance. The crowded restaurant fell silent. Cline knew the story; the girl had probably started with oxycodone prescribed by her doctor for some mild injury. Whiplash from a fender-bender. Muscle spasms from lifting the kid wrong. The girl would be one of the skeletons Cline never saw, the ones who met his boys in beat-up houses on the outskirts of town or in cars in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. The oxy would have led to heroin. The heroin would have led to fentanyl—the gray death. Cline smiled. Maybe he’d be on to Portland sooner than he’d thought.
The men returned to their seats as the waiters pushed, prodded, and cajoled the angry woman and her family out. Cline didn’t need to say it, but he looked his boys in the eyes anyway as he refilled his glass from the bottle on the table.
“Druly,” he said. “Write it down.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THERE ARE DUTIES at the Inn that are mine alone, no matter how desperately I’d like to delegate them, so I headed back to take care of them. I wanted to follow Craft to his house and give him a parenting lesson with my fists, but I knew I needed time to think, to cool down, or I’d get myself arrested and lose whatever leads I had on the smiley-face pills. On my way back, I dropped Nick in town and stopped to watch the waves crashing off Norman’s Woe, a rock reef visible from the shore. I’m not the world’s most imaginative guy, but now and again, back when I was mourning my lost job and trying to connect with Gloucester, I would go and look at the reef at low tide and think about the ships scuttled there in the night, the sickening grind of the hull, the panic and sorrow of the crew. Gloucester is proud of its shipping history, and for me, looking out at the rocks and imagining the brutal, tenuous lives of the fishermen was a sort of memorial. Sometimes the tourist boat Adventuress would come sailing by to add weight to my fantasies, the gaff-rigged schooner slicing through
waves toward the harbor as travelers aboard took pictures with their phones.
I got back to the Inn and checked on a few overnight guests—a guy in a suit who seemed to have driven a long way from somewhere and a couple of young lovebirds—all the time thinking about voices calling for help in the stormy night and the reassuring light of shore.
One of my permanent residents, Neddy Ives, lives in a room on the third floor. He actually lives there on a permanent basis, seemingly never leaving the room, which is the only one that has an attached en suite bathroom with a shower and toilet. None of the residents, including me, have ever seen Neddy. Siobhan described him as a tall, quiet man in his fifties who wouldn’t meet her gaze and who paid his rent into our bank account via a legal firm in Boston called Benkely and Marsh. My theory is that Ned is an ex-inmate most comfortable existing in one room, but I don’t know for sure. That afternoon I warmed up the frozen dinner Neddy likes and set it outside his door, then I took away the trash he’d left secured in a little bag on the doorknob. After that I started dinner for the crew, a task that heaped more dread onto the already sizable pile sitting like rocks in my stomach.
I’m the world’s worst cook. That’s not an exaggeration. There are people who burn stuff, undercook stuff, always turn out watery or misshapen or weird-tasting food. I do all of those things. My fare is burned on the outside, raw on the inside, and the residents of the Inn frequently have to guess what I was trying to make and what the ingredients are. My culinary failures are not for lack of trying. I follow recipes, both the published ones in heavy, sauce-splattered books and the almost indecipherable scrawled ones Siobhan left on the backs of envelopes and receipts.
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