Bad Men (2003) Read online

  He stared straight ahead, gripping the wheel tightly, working at the plastic. Scarfe said nothing. Barron wanted to scream, to rage at the injustice of it all. He was a cop. These people had no right to put him through this. He could smell Scarfe beside him. He stank of sweat and unwashed clothes and desperation. Barron needed to get away from him.

  “Give me the keys.”

  Scarfe handed over the keys to an Isuzu Trooper parked out at the Maine Mall. The Trooper, sourced by Scarfe, was scanner equipped. Barron was to use the Trooper for his part of the job, then just leave the keys in it and walk away. Scarfe would take care of its disposal.

  “Now get out of the car,” said Barron.

  Scarfe climbed out silently. There was a red mark on his left cheek, and his left eye was tearing.

  “You didn’t have to hit me,” he said.

  “I know,” said Barron. “I did it because I wanted to.”

  Then he drove away.

  Chapter Ten

  They ditched the vans at a wrecking yard just outside Brockton and prepared to pick up some replacements. Powell and Tell took care of the details, although Powell, who had grown fond of driving the Econoline, expressed his regret at seeing it go.

  “Well, maybe we could hold on to it, just for you,” suggested Tell. “We could get something written along the side, like ‘We Are the Guys You’re Looking For!’ ”

  They watched as the Econoline’s roof collapsed inward under the pressure of the crane’s jaws. Glass shattered, and the van shuddered as if in pain. It reminded Powell of the way a man’s face will crumple when he’s shot.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Still, we had some good times in that van.”

  Tell tried to figure out if Powell was joking, but couldn’t. “You need to make some more friends, man,” he said.

  They headed for the battered trailer that functioned as the lot’s office. It smelled bad. An ancient gray filing cabinet spewed yellowed paper from an open drawer, and the carpet was dotted with cigarette burns. Nicotine-smeared blinds obscured the windows.

  “Looks like business is booming,” said Powell. “You guys must be planning to float on the stock exchange pretty soon.”

  There were three men waiting for them, and none of them smiled. Two pieces of ex-Soviet muscle stood at either side of a third man, who sat behind a cheap plastic desk. The seated man was wearing a plaid jacket over a vile sports shirt. The other men favored leather blouson jackets, the sort that bad disc jockeys wore to public events. Even Powell, who still missed the days when a guy could wear the sleeves of his pastel jacket rolled up to his elbows, thought the men were kind of badly dressed.

  Tell, meanwhile, was trying to figure out where the guys were from. Dexter had told him that the main man was Russian, so he figured the others were probably Russian too. They were dressed like shit, which was kind of a giveaway. Tell didn’t know what it was about the new breed of immigrant criminals, but they had the dress sense of fucking lizards. Everything had to shine. If these guys were making money, they were spending it all on acrylics.

  The seated man had skin like a battlefield. He’d tried to mask the damage with a beard but it was scraggly and untidy. His hair was thinning unevenly. A patch of pink showed over his left ear. Tell wondered if the guy had some kind of disease, and was relieved that he hadn’t been forced to shake his hand. He had introduced himself as Phil. Yeah, right, thought Tell: Phil, short for Vladimir.

  “Dexter didn’t come himself, no?” asked Phil.

  “Dexter’s kind of busy right now,” said Tell.

  “I’m offended that he would not take the time to visit an old friend.”

  “You get his Christmas card? ’Cause I know he sent it.”

  “No card,” said Phil.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” said Tell.

  “Yes,” said Phil. “It is.”

  He looked genuinely hurt.

  Tell was getting antsy. Dexter had warned him to stay cool, Shepherd too, but Phil was beginning to get on his nerves and he’d been in his company for only a couple of minutes.

  “We’re in kind of a hurry here,” said Tell.

  “Yes, always hurry,” said Phil. “Too much rush.”

  “It’s the way of the world,” said Powell. “People don’t take the time to stop and smell the roses.”

  Tell looked at him, but Powell appeared to be genuine. The only thing Tell was smelling in here was rotting carpets and cheap aftershave.

  “Your friend know,” said Phil. “He understand.”

  Tell was going to have words with Powell once they got outside. He didn’t want Powell to start thinking of himself as some kind of mystic.

  Phil picked up a brown envelope from the desk and tossed it to Tell. “Two vans,” he said.

  “We wanted three.”

  “No three. Two only. No time.”

  “Too much rush,” said Tell.

  Phil smiled for the first time. “Yes, yes, too much rush. You tell Dexter to come see me.”

  Tell raised the envelope in farewell, and tried to smile back. “Yeah, you bet.”

  He and Powell turned to leave. They were at the door when Phil said: “And, hey!”

  Tell looked back. Phil was now standing, and all three men had guns in their hands.

  “You tell him to bring my money when he comes,” Phil said. “And you tell him to hurry.”

  Macy was enjoying Larry Amerling’s company. She could tell that he was used to charming the pants off the women who came by the post office (literally, in some cases, she felt certain), but he was funny and knowledgeable and Macy was already beginning to get some sense of the geography of the island.

  Amerling told her to hang a right and they followed the road uphill until they came to the main lookout tower. It had five stories, four of them with horizontal slit windows on three sides, a concrete lip overshadowing each window. There was a single chimney at the top. Five glass-strewn steps led up to the reinforced-steel doorway. The door was open.

  “Kids,” said Amerling. “Joe tries to keep the towers locked up, but they just break right back in again.”

  “Mind if I take a look?” asked Macy.

  “Hold your nose,” said Amerling. “I’ll stay here and smoke a cigarette.”

  They both got out of the Explorer. Amerling walked down to the road to light up, stealing a glance back at Macy as she climbed the steps. Fine-looking woman, thought Amerling. If I was only…

  He tried to make the calculation, then gave it up as too depressing.

  Macy pushed the door open and stepped inside. To her left, the words “Toilet Here” had been spray-painted on the wall over what had once served as a fireplace. She decided not to look down. There were no windows on this level, and the floor was bare concrete. To her left, a flight of concrete steps led up to the next level. She took them and came to the second floor. The slit windows were masked with layers of Plexiglas, and dead insects were trapped inside. Macy continued to climb until the concrete steps were replaced with wooden stairs to the top floor. A ladder hung down from a square access door leading to the roof. She climbed up and slipped the bolt.

  The wind hit her as she stepped onto the roof, causing her jacket to flap outward like the wings of a startled bird. She zipped it up and walked to the edge. The tower stood high above even the tallest trees, and from her vantage point she could see the Cove, the smaller towers along the coastline, the neighboring islands, ships heading out to sea, even the mainland itself in the distance. The air smelled clean and fresh, with a faint hint of smoke, but the skies were heavy and gray and there was a bitingly cold edge to the wind. She turned to her right and saw Amerling smoking his cigarette. He looked up and waved, and she raised a hand in return until she was distracted by the sight of a blue truck rolling up the road. It was in bad shape, because gray-blue exhaust fumes not only curled from the pipe but seemed to envelop the vehicle entirely. That can’t be right, Macy thought. He’s moving fast, and the wind is blowing agai
nst him anyway. How can the fumes surround him in that way?

  Then, as she watched, the truck slowed and the smoke appeared to peel away, forming two columns that faded into the forest to the left and right and then dispersed. Macy waited for a moment or two longer, still unsure as to quite what she had seen, then climbed back down the ladder and headed to the door.

  She didn’t notice the crude drawings of dying men and burning houses carved into the concrete with a piece of discarded stone, or the length of white hair caught in the bottom rung of the ladder.

  Or the child’s cloth doll that watched her impassively from the corner of the room, its body shimmering as the moths moved upon it.

  The truck had pulled up alongside Larry Amerling. The man leaning out of its window wore a dirty green windbreaker and a Sea Dogs baseball cap. His face was permanently tanned from years of working outdoors, but his nose was red and swollen and veins had broken badly across his cheeks. He made a sucking sound with his teeth as Macy approached and allowed his eyes to linger on her thighs and crotch. She was relieved to note that Amerling looked embarrassed on the man’s behalf.

  “This here’s Carl Lubey,” said Amerling. “He lives up the road. Carl, this is Officer Macy.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Lubey. He made it sound like an invitation to his bed.

  Macy contented herself with a nod and gave no indication that the man’s name meant anything to her. So this was the brother of the man Dupree had killed. She hated herself for agreeing with Barron’s assessment, but if his brother had been anything like Carl, then Dupree might have done society a favor. Carl Lubey was making her skin crawl.

  “You got something wrong with your truck?” she asked him.

  “Truck’s running fine,” he replied.

  “Seemed to me like you were producing a lot of fumes. You ought to get it looked at.”

  “Don’t need looking at. I told you, truck’s fine.”

  “If you say so. It happens again and you could be looking at a citation.”

  Lubey made that sucking noise through his teeth again.

  “You want to come over, maybe help me clean out my pipes, you let me know,” he said. He winked broadly at her, then put the truck in gear and went on his way. This time, there was only a hint of exhaust smoke.

  “Does he live alone out there?” asked Macy.

  “Does Carl look like the kind of guy who has women beating down his door? Yeah, he’s alone. I don’t think he ever got over—”

  He stopped.

  “I know about it,” said Macy.

  “Yeah, well, then you understand. He always did have a lot of bitterness inside him. What happened to his brother just added a little extra piss to his vinegar, if you’ll excuse the phrase. Pardon me saying it, but it didn’t look like there was anything wrong with his truck.”

  Macy shook her head. “When he was coming up the road, it seemed like he was surrounded by gray smoke. Then it just sort of…faded away. It was real odd.”

  She turned to Amerling but he was looking away, staring at the road Carl Lubey had just taken, as if hoping to see some trace of the smoke for himself.

  “I’d best be getting back,” he said. He stomped his cigarette out on the ground, then picked up the butt and put it in the pocket of his jacket. “Mail won’t sort itself.”

  They drove in silence for a time, until Macy said, “I couldn’t see the Site from the top of the tower. That’s what they call it, isn’t it, the Site?”

  Amerling took a moment to reply.

  “Trees keep it hidden.”

  “Even in winter?”

  “Even in winter. There’s a lot of evergreens out here.”

  “It’s over to the south, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, but you can’t get there by car, and even on foot you need to know where you’re going. At this time of year, with the light fading so early, I’m not even sure I could find it.”

  “Another time, then,” said Macy.

  “Sure,” Amerling lied. “Another time.”

  Moloch saw Dexter staring back at him in the rearview. Leonie and Dexter sat up front, Braun behind them, and Moloch farther back. There was a hollow panel in the floor, big enough for a man to lie in, if necessary, although if he was there for longer than a couple of minutes, he’d probably suffocate. Moloch knew it was for weapons, maybe even drugs. It was a last resort for him in the event of a police search, and nothing more.

  “You okay?” asked Dexter.

  Moloch nodded. They had been traveling for about three hours, and his back ached. They had passed the toll booth at the New Hampshire state line shortly after nine and entered Maine. The traffic was light, most of it headed south toward Boston. They took the Kittery exit, and pulled up outside the Kittery Trading Post. Braun and Leonie went inside, leaving Moloch to rage alone silently.

  As they had drawn closer and closer to Maine, Moloch had felt a pain building in his head. He found himself drifting into sleep, his eyes closing and his chin nodding to his chest, until a charge like a jolt of electricity forced him back into waking once again. But in those glancing moments of semirest, his body racked by exhaustion, he was tormented by visions, images of pasts both known and unknown, at once familiar and strange.

  He saw himself as a small boy, hands pressed against the window of a black car as it pulled away from a suburban house, the boy’s bicycle momentarily forgotten, his fingers brushing the glass as the car sped up, a man struggling in the backseat, his eyes wide with panic, two men holding him down. The man’s hand reached out, as if somehow the boy could save him, but nobody could save him.

  Dad?

  No, not Dad, not really, but the closest he had come to finding one, a foster father and a foster mother on a street of identical houses, each with a small square of green lawn, its quiet disturbed only by the hiss of sprinklers and, now, the noise of the car as it pulled away from the curb.

  Inside the house, the woman was crying. She lay slumped in a corner of the kitchen, blood running from her nose and mouth. She had been baking a cake, and now flour and broken eggs covered the floor around her. The boy went to her, and she took him in her arms and held him to her.

  The next day, more men came, and they were forced to leave the house. The boy fled with his not-mother, moving from town to town, watching her as she grew more and more desperate, descending into some terrible dark place all her own, where men came and pounded on her body and left piles of ragged bills on the dresser when they were done. And the boy wondered, as he grew older: Who am I, and where have I come from, if I am not of this woman?

  Then there were other women—mothers, sisters, daughters—flashing before him, and he heard half-familiar names spoken. He was in a house by a lake. He was on a streetcar, a man holding his hand.

  He was on the island, and his voice was whispering: Know me, wife.

  Moloch jerked into wakefulness again. Dexter was now reading a newspaper. Moloch closed his eyes again.

  This is not my past. It is a past, but it is not mine. I am more than this.

  The island returned to him and he smelled the sea and the pines, and he heard a sound as of a moth tapping on glass, struggling to escape the darkness.

  Or to return to it.

  The others returned about a half hour later. They had bought warm clothing, waterproofs, and a selection of minor weaponry: knives, mainly; a handheld ax; and a hunting bow for Dexter. As for guns, they already had what they needed.

  Powell handed Dexter the bow case. Dexter opened it and removed the big bow contained within.

  “I don’t understand why you need that,” Moloch said. He still felt groggy and ill. He needed sleep, proper sleep. The tapping sound that he had heard in his dream had not gone away now that he was awake. Instead, it remained there, like water trapped in his inner ear.

  “It’s not about needing. I like the feel of a bow.”

  “You ever kill a man with a bow?” asked Powell.

  “No. Kil
led one with an arrow, though.” Dexter grinned.

  “You really think we’re going to need all this stuff up here?” Braun asked Moloch.

  Moloch shook his head, as much in answer as in an effort to rid himself of the infernal noise in his head.

  “We get there, find her, make her return my money, then we kill her. We don’t want to make trouble for ourselves and bring them down upon us. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have her before they even know we’ve been there.”

  “So, like I asked, why do we need all of this?”

  Moloch looked at him the way he might have looked at a slow child.

  “Because nothing ever goes according to plan,” he said simply.

  The ferry to Portland contained just two passengers: an old man going to see his oncologist, and Marianne. She missed Danny and wished that he were with her, but she had to visit the banks and he would quickly have become bored with the waiting and the filling out of forms.

  Bonnie had asked her little about her date, apart from inquiring whether it had gone well. She told her that Danny and Richie had enjoyed their evening together, and she didn’t mind if he stayed with her for the best part of another day. Richie had cheered at the news. Richie was a wonderful kid—she could never think of him as anything but a kid—and the people on the island looked out for him. In some ways, Dutch was the best environment for a boy like him. No harm could come to him, and in the close-knit community, he knew affection and support. To Danny, he was almost like a big brother, even though Danny, who was a smart boy, recognized that his playmate was different and that, in some ways, Danny had to look out for Richie more than Richie had to watch out for Danny.

  But she had warned Danny not to follow Richie when he went exploring on the island. She knew that Richie liked to ramble through the woods and that Bonnie had given up trying to discourage him from doing so because Richie would go anyway, sneaking out of the house and sending her wild with worry. Better that he told her where he was going than to have him simply disappear without a word. While Marianne liked Richie, she knew that he was incapable of looking after her son, and Danny had been told, on pain of eternal grounding and loss of his allowance for the rest of his life, not to go anywhere with Richie unless Bonnie went along too.