The Inn

by James Patterson

  “His name’s Cline!” Craft howled, sinking to his knees. The arms that slipped through my grip were reed thin and covered in scabbed sores. Craft was sobbing on the wet rubber floor. “Mitchell Cline. He lives in town. Don’t tell him I gave him up, man.”

  “You mix with violent people, you get violence,” I said. “If Cline wants to hurt you for snitching on him, I’m not going to intervene. You signed that deal yourself.”

  “I don’t care if he hurts me.” Craft sniffled, rubbing his nose on his arm. “I just don’t want him to cut me off his list. He can ban whoever he wants. I need the gear, man, and Cline’s got all the dealers wrapped up around here.” Craft looked up at me, his red eyes full of tears. “Please,” he said. “I need him.”

  I left Craft sniveling and feeling sorry for himself in the wet, reeking hall outside the head and walked back up to Nick. He had lifted the woman from the floor and was holding her in his arms like a baby, her head against his shoulder.

  “You get a name?” he said when he saw me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, because we gotta get out of here.” He turned toward the door. “This woman ain’t right.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  NICK SAT IN the back of the car with the woman from the boatyard, her head in his lap, and monitored her pulse, his fingers on her carotid. We exchanged worried glances in the rearview mirror all the way to Addison Gilbert.

  The nurse behind the ER triage desk, an African-American woman whose name tag said BESS, took one look at Nick and the woman in his arms and pulled a microphone sticking up from the counter toward her mouth. Her fingers sported bright yellow nails that were two inches long and pointed like claws.

  “Code Orange in the ER, please, Code Orange,” Bess announced. She spotted me and ran her eyes up and down my form.

  “Can I have the patient’s name, please?” Bess said.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “We found her like this. I believe she’s probably had—”

  “Fentanyl,” Bess said. “It’s the flavor of the month.” She dragged the microphone to her lips again. “I said Code Orange in the ER, please. Code Orange.”

  Whatever the term Code Orange was supposed to initiate, it didn’t seem to work. I looked around the waiting room. There was a young couple on gray plastic chairs watching the television in the corner, ice packs and a paper towel on the man’s wrist. Bess sighed and walked through a side door, then reappeared through double swinging doors to our right pushing a gurney. The emergency room behind her was filled with life. Nurses in pale blue scrubs jogged across the crowded space; family members stood in corners looking worried.

  “It’s a bit hectic today.” Bess walked up to Nick, took the woman from his arms like she weighed nothing, and laid her on the gurney. She pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. “We’ve had two other dreamers like this young thing already this morning. One’s got brain damage, and the other didn’t make it.”

  I stood by Nick, feeling oddly self-conscious as Bess checked the woman’s vitals.

  “You seem shocked, honey,” Bess said to me. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. Bess’s total lack of panic about the unconscious patient rattled me. She made a note on the nameless victim’s chart with a pen she took from her breast pocket, pink with a fluffy poof swinging from a chain.

  “You need somewhere to sit down, you let me know. I’ll find you a nice warm spot.” She winked at me. Nick pursed his lips. Bess wheeled the woman into the emergency room and returned to her desk a couple of minutes later.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve seen these floating around the emergency room lately,” I said, showing her the pills I’d confiscated from Rick Craft’s boat. Bess reached over and took my hand.

  “Let me get a closer look.” She examined the capsules but kept holding my hand, stroking my thumb with hers. “Oh yeah, sure, honey. We sucked a couple of these yellow ones out of a girl’s stomach yesterday.”

  “What’s the difference between the yellow ones and the red ones?” Nick asked.

  “The red ones are the angry ones.” Bess held the pill up, still holding my hand in hers. “They’ll straight-up snuff you if you’re not a long-term serious addict with a tolerance. They’re not for a party. You want a party, it’s the yellow smileys, the purple dopeys, or the green winky faces. Just different combinations of uppers and downers, cerebral and bodily effects.”

  She let my hand go and took a folder from behind the desk. Nick was barely keeping it together over Bess’s obvious affection for me. I kicked him in the ankle as Bess opened a page to photographs of colorful pills. “We started seeing them about four months ago, but we already knew they were on their way. Lots of deaths down in Boston. You two local cops or something? How come I’ve never seen you in here before?”

  “He used to be a cop.” Nick nudged me. Bess perked up.

  “My brother is a lawman,” she said. “You’re good people. Me, I wasn’t so interested in locking folks up. I’d rather care for them. I can spot someone who needs a bit of tender loving care from fifteen miles out. You running an investigation?”

  “We’re just concerned citizens trying to protect our town.” I gave Nick a warning look. “Renegades, I guess you could call us.”

  “Outlaws dealing justice.” Nick nodded.

  “That’s pretty sexy,” Bess said.

  “Undeniably,” I agreed. “It’s a sexy job, but someone’s got to do it.”

  Bess shrugged. “Well, you two want to protect something, you ought to just stand out there.” She pointed between us at the glass doors of the entrance. “Last week we had a guy in here fell off a ladder and broke his clavicle. We gave him two weeks’ worth of oxy to get him through. He got attacked in the parking lot. Didn’t even make it to his car.”

  “Jesus, they’re robbing people for their meds?”

  “Sometimes they rob them, sometimes they beg them or threaten them. That’s the addicts who do that. The dealers, they don’t need to use violence. They pay the doctors to write the scripts.”

  A man in a white coat came out of the emergency room, walked to a cabinet behind Bess, and extracted a chart from a drawer. He was young and sharply dressed, fiddling with the ID badge that was clipped to his lavender shirt. One look told me he’d been listening to Bess from behind the door. He glanced at us quickly, taking in our faces. I wanted to warn Bess, but she hadn’t seen the man walk in behind her.

  “We had an old lady come in our pharmacy trying to get her methadone prescription from over on Amble Street filled,” Bess said. “Enough methadone to kill a horse, you ask me. She obviously hadn’t been taking the prescribed dose because she wasn’t stone-cold dead, so she must have been giving the pills to somebody. The pharmacy sent her to us.”

  “Excuse me.” The lavender-shirted doctor came over with his hand up like he was ready to start pushing people around. “It’s not our policy to chitchat over the triage desk about our patients. Who are you?”

  “Bill Robinson. I own the Inn on the water.”

  “I’ve seen that place,” Bess said, apparently unfazed by her superior’s tone. “Looks real nice. Maybe I ought to drive out there one time, take a weekend off, rejuvenate myself. You one of those live-in owners, Bill? Place got a hot tub?”

  “We were just talking about the increasing overdose numbers,” I told the doctor. When he stopped fiddling with his ID badge, I could see his name: Raymond Locke. “You must be concerned, the way things are going. Are doctors in this hospital being investigated for writing false prescriptions?”

  “If you have no other business here today, Mr. Robinson, I suggest you move on,” Locke said. “This is an emergency department, not a coffee shop.”

  “I’ll need your number, Mr. Inn Owner, before you go.” Bess smiled. “You know, just in case.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  SUSAN WAS ALREADY at her laptop when I called from the hospital parking lot and asked for Cline’s address. I could
hear birds in the background and the clunk of her coffee mug on the dining-room table.

  “I know you don’t want to use your Bureau connections,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m trying to do it discreetly. Hopefully I won’t get any menacing calls from my old colleagues. It’s not the kind of job you can keep one foot in and one foot out of. Once you’re out, you’re out.”

  I gripped the phone hard, remembering McGinniskin’s words. You’re both out. Shame flooded me, made my face burn.

  “You keep it up, and I’ll have to start charging a fee,” Susan said. I heard her tapping the keys.

  “They say if you’re good at something, you should never do it for free,” I said. “Can I pay my debt in terrible dinners? What about questionable life advice?”

  “You could let Effie paint the house. Local kids are going to start thinking a witch lives here.”

  “Don’t talk about Angelica like that—she’s just eccentric.”

  “Oh Jesus.” She sighed, then read me an address. “I’ve also got the rap sheet here. This is not a nice guy we’re dealing with, Bill. Assault. Assault. Public nuisance. Possession with intent to sell. Assault. Quite a bit of arson in his younger years. You know what arsonists are like.”

  “Not really.”

  “There have been a few studies on the link between pyromania and psychopathy,” she said. “Think about it. You carry a lighter around in your hand, you hold the key to big, glorious, spectacular destruction. Fires consume, dominate, kill indiscriminately. Cline set a lot of fires as a kid. He wasn’t charged in any of them, though—this is all from a psych report I’ve dug up.”

  “It’s a bit like pills,” I mused.

  “How so?”

  “The key to indiscriminate destruction in your very own pocket,” I said. “You dole out drugs, you spread addiction like a disease. People like Cline go from town to town distributing a product that consumes, ravages, destroys.”

  We were both quiet, silenced by the weight of our thoughts.

  “Hey,” she said suddenly. “Dough Brothers called here looking for Marni. Said she didn’t turn up for her shift. Have you seen her? She’s not answering her cell and she’s not in her room.”

  “I haven’t seen her. I’ll keep an eye out. Thanks, Susan.”

  I hung up and started the car. Nick had his boots on the dash again. As we rolled toward town, we passed Living the Dream getting into his car on Washington Street. Nick’s eyes flickered over him but his expression didn’t change.

  “Can we talk about last night?” I asked.

  “What do you want to know?” Nick stretched and yawned.

  “I want to know where you got that big-ass rifle, for one thing,” I said.

  “I’ve got a couple of guns left over from the service. I keep them under the bed, but I’ll keep them in Clay’s safe if you’re worried.”

  “I am worried.” I looked at him.

  “Well, don’t be. Sometimes I get a bit turned around, that’s all.”

  “Nick, you were standing in freezing water talking about secret agents and anagrams,” I said. “I had to spend the rest of the night chiseling my balls out of solid blocks of ice.”

  “I like anagrams,” he said. “Did you know William Robinson is an anagram for Rainbow Millions?”

  “You’re doing that thing you always do, trying to combat criticism by pretending it’s no big deal. I’m serious, Nick. I think you have an unhealthy obsession with Living the Dream.”

  “Living the Dream?”

  “The dog-walking guy,” I said.

  “Oh, him. I don’t even know him.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “It’s him this time. What’ll it be next time? Cryptic messages coming through the floorboards? A midnight raid?”

  Nick let his seat back, put his hands behind his head. “I ever tell you about the time we found an arm?”

  I sighed.

  “There was just this arm in the middle of the desert,” Nick said. “A bunch of little kids from this village were all gathered together looking at something and we thought we’d go investigate. What do you know? A dude’s arm. No sign of the dude, not in the whole village, not in the surrounding area. The arm had a watch on it and everything. Every time I put my watch on in the morning, I think about that guy’s arm and wonder what the hell happened.”

  “I think you need to see someone,” I said.

  “I’ll see someone when you see someone.” Nick laughed. “Maybe we could see each other? Save the money.”

  “I don’t need to see anyone.”

  “Really?” Nick shifted in his seat. “Is there some reason you prefer living in the basement with the rats and the paint cans and the boxes of Siobhan’s stuff rather than in the loft, as she intended? See? Don’t go poking around in my brain and I won’t go poking around in yours.”

  “The veterans hospital will help you find a guy,” I said. “And if there is an up-front fee, you can take it out of your rent.”

  “No, thanks,” Nick said.

  “Nick—”

  “No, thanks,” he snapped.

  I drove us toward town in silence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I DON’T KNOW what I was expecting of Mitchell Cline’s house. I suppose I thought that anyone who dealt the life-destroying products Cline did would have some stain on his home. But his house was not the filthy, smelly, half-burned bedroom of Winley Minnow or the reeking-of-excrement, forgotten seaside hole of Rick Craft.

  Cline’s Queen Anne–style mansion dominated the end of Stuart Street, a curved cul-de-sac on the water. I could see why he’d chosen the spot. There was one way in and one way out by road, and an acre of forest had been cleared behind the house, making a surprise raid by the police difficult. The other houses on the block seemed almost to shy away from Cline’s; his property was bordered by towering cypresses and hedges that two gardeners, a man and a squat, sweating woman, were trimming as we pulled up. I parked at the bottom of the driveway. Two black Escalades loomed at the top of it, watched over by men who I assumed were their drivers along with some others. I counted five people near the cars and three on the porch just hanging out, texting or moving to music coming from inside the house.

  Noise. It hit us as soon as we popped the doors of my car. The whir of the gardener’s trimmer and the thumping music, a pair of girls sitting on a wicker couch, laughing. It was clear who belonged to the house and who didn’t. Cline’s employees wore glimmering cuff links and tailored trousers, a jarring contrast with their scarred, tattooed knuckles and the muscles bulging against the fabric. The crowd stopped and watched us approach.

  “Cline here?” I asked a big lug leaning on the front of one of the Escalades. He was missing the top of his left ear, and he sniffed the air like a hound as he looked us over.

  “Who?” he said.

  “We want to talk about these.” Nick, looking impossibly small next to the brute in a suit, held up the red pill we’d taken from Craft.

  “You chumps are on private property.” The goon pointed to our car. “Move the shitbox before it leaks oil on the driveway and someone has to clean it up with your face.”

  “Yeah. Fuck off, po-po!” one of the girls yelled, barely getting the insult out before she and her friend descended into giggles. It was clear to me that Cline and his people would require a convincing display rather than an eloquent proposal. I calmly plucked up a bucket-size potted plant from a collection by the mailbox.

  “Special delivery,” I announced.

  Nick watched, his arms folded, as I hurled the pot into the windshield of the Escalade.

  The crunch of glass shattering, then the blaring alarm. Three of Cline’s guys rushed forward like dogs who’d been let off their leashes; two went for Nick, while the biggest one grabbed me by the shirt, put his face inches from mine. I barely maintained my calm, but as I’d expected, the noise of the crash summoned their leader.

  “Boys” was all he
had to say. I was let go. The two goons who had backed Nick against the car stepped away.

  Cline, at the top of the stairs, cut the music with a tap on his mobile phone, which he then slipped into the back pocket of his gray slacks. He waved a hand at one of the goons on the porch, and he took out the keys and silenced the car alarm. The gardeners ran off around the side of the house, aware, it seemed, when they needed to make themselves scarce.

  Cline did not act like a drug lord being harangued by a pair of local desperadoes. He seemed more like a mildly curious homeowner inspecting the work of gophers on his lawn. Cline walked down the steps, a slight frown on his otherwise perfect brow, taking in the sight of us as he tucked a hardcover book under his arm.

  “I hope that’s a guide to New Hampshire,” Nick said, pointing at the book. “You’re going to need it.”

  The silence Cline had seemingly willed into existence was eerie. He gave a gentle sigh, looking at the pot in the car windshield.

  “Anyone get a name for these punks?” he asked.

  “Bill Robinson,” I said. “Nick Jones.” I nodded at Nick. “We’re returning something you lost.”

  I took the pill from Nick and tossed it at Cline’s chest. He didn’t try to catch it. Didn’t flinch. It bounced off his chest and landed on the pavement.

  “I have witnesses who can connect you to the distribution of at least two of those pills,” I said. “One of which caused an overdose and another that destroyed a family home. After I ride around for a couple more days surveying the shit-storm you’ve brought down on this town, I’ll be able to connect you to some fatalities.”

  “Listen to this guy.” Cline smiled. Perfect teeth. He still hadn’t addressed me directly yet, like he was a rock star and I was a hopeless fan yelling up at him from the crowd at a concert. He would choose who he wanted to shine his light on.

  “There are plenty of prosecutors in Boston who will run a murder charge on a dealer who supplies a fatal dose of an illegal narcotic,” Nick said. “Especially if someone connects the dots for them.”