Bad Men Read online

  “I don’t say. The only one I’ve heard about is George Sherrin. I think the others are just attempts to add to the legend. You know, people leave the island for their own reasons and don’t come back, and suddenly there’s another name in the pot. But what I just told you about George Sherrin, well, that’s real. You can put that in the bank and watch it draw interest.”

  He knocked back his beer and raised his hand for another round. Instead, Macy pushed her untouched second beer in front of him.

  “Take mine, I’m all done.”

  “You’re going? Hey, don’t go. Stay a little longer.”

  His hand reached for hers, but she went for her jacket instead, narrowly avoiding contact. She put it on and saw Barron’s eyes following the zipper as she pulled it up over her breasts.

  “No, I got to go. I have things to do.”

  “What things?” he said, and she could hear something in his tone, something that made her real glad that there were other people around them in the bar, that they weren’t sitting alone in a car somewhere or, worse, back at Barron’s place. He’d asked her back there that afternoon, suggesting they watch a movie on cable, maybe get some Thai food. She’d declined and they’d ended up here instead. Suddenly it seemed to her like the wisest decision she’d made in a very long time.

  “Just things,” she said. “Thanks for the beer and, y’know, looking out for me during training.”

  But Barron had left her and was now standing at the bar. He lifted her untouched beer, leaned over the counter, and poured it into the sink. She shook her head, picked up her knapsack, and walked out.

  Macy thought about all that she had been told as she drove home, about Dupree and the island and George Sherrin. She thought too about Barron, and shuddered instinctively at the memory of his touch. The weeks of training under Barron had been difficult. At first it hadn’t been so bad. Barron had kept his distance and played everything by the book. But gradually she became increasingly uneasy around him, conscious always of how close he would stand to her; of the relish with which he told self-glorifying stories of inflicting violence on “smart-mouths” and “punks”; and of the looks some of the street kids would shoot him when he approached them, like dogs that had been kicked once too often. It was only in the final weeks that Barron had started to put some tentative moves on her. He was careful, aware of the potential for harassment complaints, or of action by his superiors if they found out that he was even attempting to form a relationship with a probation cop in his charge, but the desire was there. Macy had felt it like a bad rash.

  Macy knew that she was pretty, and that she possessed, superficially at least, a kind of vulnerability that drew a certain type of man to her. Scratch that: it drew a whole lot of different types to her, and she had learned to sidestep their attentions with a grace that would have befit a ballerina. Barron was subtler than most, but it was perhaps that subtlety that was most off-putting. While most men made a frontal assault, Barron was the kind who crept up, like a sneak thief. They were the worst types and had to be watched most closely.

  She thought too of an incident that had occurred the night before, one that still troubled her. Macy and Barron had been heading down Congress, doing their standard loop, when they saw him. The lights picked out a figure in a black Alpha Industries aviator’s jacket, the hood of his gray jogging top hanging over the back of the jacket, a watch cap on his head. He took one look at the cruiser and started to walk briskly in the opposite direction.

  “Will you look at this joker?” said Barron. He depressed the accelerator slightly, causing the patrol car to increase its speed to match the guy. Watch cap looked over his shoulder, then ran.

  “I mean, seriously,” Barron continued. He could have been talking about the return of flared pants or the revival of progressive rock for all the concern in his voice. “Here’s conclusive evidence that a whole lot of criminals are just plain dumb. If this guy could just have kept his head for ten seconds”—he swung the wheel to the right as the suspect made a turn onto Pine—“then he would have been free and clear. Instead, he decides to outrun Miss Crown Vic here, and I’m telling you now, I don’t think this is a healthy man. Look at the vapor trail he’s leaving. It’s like chasing a crop duster. Okay, screw this. Let’s light him.”

  Barron hit the gumballs and the siren, and put his foot down hard to the floor. Already, the guy was visibly wilting. When they swung into the parking lot behind him, he seemed almost grateful to be forced to stop. Barron stepped out from behind the wheel seconds later, and the two cops came at him in a narrowing V. The runner had his hands raised and was breathing as if he were about to bust a gut. Barron seemed to do a double take when he got close enough to identify the man. It was hardly noticeable, but it was there.

  “Hey,” said Barron. “Terry Scarfe. Look, Macy, it’s Terry Scarfe. How you doin’, Terry? They let you out? The fuck were they thinking?”

  “Maybe they took a vote,” said Macy. Scarfe’s name had been on a circulated list of new parolees. According to the other cops, he was a well-known local lowlife. He was just over five feet tall and desperately thin. His face was heavily lined, despite his comparative youth, as though it still bore the imprint of the last foot that had stepped on it.

  “Yeah, like a straw poll. You, Terry, are the weakest link. Now get the fuck out of our nice prison. You carrying, Terry?”

  Scarfe shook his head.

  “You sure now? Because I better not frisk you and find something that draws blood. I gotta say that if you think the airlines are kind of strict, then wait until you get a load of me. I find even a sharp fingernail clipping and I’m going to have you charged with carrying an offensive weapon. And that’s in addition to you just being offensive, period. So let me ask you again, Terry. Anything in there we should know about? Sharps? Needles?”

  Scarfe found his voice.

  “I told you, I got nothing.”

  “On the ground,” said Barron.

  “Aw, come on, it’s cold. I’m telling you—”

  Barron came at him hard and shoved him to the ground. Scarfe landed on his knees and seemed about to protest, until Barron pushed him down fully and his chin hit the ground.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Scarfe whined while Barron patted him down.

  “Get up,” Barron said when he was done.

  Scarfe got to his feet and rubbed the dirt from his hands.

  “Why did you run away from us?” asked Barron.

  “I wasn’t running away from you. I was running to someplace.”

  “Someplace where?”

  “Someplace else.”

  “You want us to take you in? How long you been out on parole?”

  “Since Monday.”

  “Monday?” said Barron loudly. “You mean you been out just a couple of days and already we’ve got you for fleeing and for failing to cooperate with your local friendly police department?”

  “I told you, I wasn’t fleeing. I’m a busy man. I got shit to do.”

  “Is it the kind of shit you can do in jail?”

  Scarfe looked at him in puzzlement. “No.”

  “Well, you seem in kind of a hurry to get back there. I just figured that maybe it was kind of nonspecific shit. You know, independent of geography.”

  Scarfe kept his mouth shut.

  “You’re an asshole, Terry,” said Barron, and his tone was more serious now. “You’re an asshole and you’re going to get in some serious trouble again if you don’t watch your step. Now get out of here.”

  Macy looked at Barron incredulously. “You’re letting him walk?”

  “What are we going to arrest him on? Dressing too young for his age?”

  “He ran.”

  “Yeah, but—Hey, are you still here?”

  Scarfe had stopped, seemingly uncertain of what to do now that the two cops were arguing about him. “I told you to go so go, before I change my mind.”

  Scarfe took one final look at Macy, shrugg
ed, then walked briskly from the parking lot and faded into the night. The two cops faced each other.

  “Come on, Macy,” said Barron. “Don’t do that shit.”

  “What shit?”

  “Criticizing me in front of a cockroach like Terry Scarfe.”

  “He wasn’t running for nothing. He’s got something going on.”

  “So, what were we supposed to do? Haul his ass in, then watch him sit on his hands for twelve hours until we get him to court? Maybe we get the right judge and his parole is revoked, and then what? So he serves another six months. Big fucking deal. Terry’s more use to us out on the street now. He hears things, and maybe we can lean on him in the future. He owes us now. We got him over a barrel.”

  Macy said nothing. They got in the car and made their way back onto Congress.

  “Come on, Macy,” Barron repeated. “Let it go.”

  But Macy remained uneasy for the rest of the shift, and she spoke little to Barron until they were on the steps of the headquarters building. There, Barron had reached out a hand and grasped her arm.

  “Are we okay?” he asked, and Macy looked into his eyes and knew better than to disagree.

  “Sure. I just don’t have a good feeling about Scarfe. We should have brought him in.”

  “He’s dumb. If he is up to something, we’ll spot it soon enough. At least if he goes down again, it will be for something more than time remaining.”

  He gave Macy his best shit-eating grin, then headed toward the lockers. Macy watched him go, and wondered if she’d seen what she thought she’d seen: Barron frisking Scarfe, then palming the small bags of white powder that he’d found in the man’s pocket. She said nothing about it to anybody. She didn’t figure Barron for a user, and maybe he was holding on to the bags for future use, possibly as payment to snitch junkies, but that didn’t sound right either. It simply wasn’t worth the risk for Barron to carry drugs, no matter what the excuse.

  Which left the possibility that Barron wanted to protect Scarfe. Once again, as she headed for home, Macy was glad that her time with Barron was now over, and despite his stories, she was curious about her upcoming island detail. Macy was not a credulous person, and while police work tended to encourage a certain amount of superstition—lucky shoes, lucky routes, lucky bullets—she was still a little surprised by what Barron had said, and more particularly by the sincerity with which he had said it. Barron really believed everything he had told her about George Sherrin and Dutch Island, or at least had fewer doubts about it than he might otherwise have been expected to entertain. Still, he had pricked her curiosity, although that would be as close as Barron ever came to pricking anything of Sharon Macy’s.

  She was curious too about the policeman, the one Barron and the others called Melancholy Joe. His story was pretty well known in Portland: his father and grandfather had both served as police officers, doing the bulk of their time out on Dutch Island. It was a peculiar arrangement, but it suited the department. They knew the island and its ways, and when police officers from outside the community had been tried on the island in the absence of a member of the Dupree family, the experiment had foundered. Crime—mundane crime, but crime nonetheless—had increased, and the nerves of the cops on temporary duty had become steadily more frayed. In the end, given that nobody particularly wanted to spend time out on Dutch anyway, the Dupree family had become the de facto first family of police work as far as Dutch Island was concerned.

  But old Frank Dupree’s marriage had produced only one son, and that son was big enough to have even other cops label him a freak. She heard that the cost of altering a police vehicle to suit his size had been met by the department. He carried the standard-issue Portland PD sidearm, the .45 Smith & Wesson, but he had adjusted the trigger guard in his own workshop so that one of his huge fingers could pass through it more easily. Occasionally, one of the local papers would do a story on “The Giant of Dutch Island,” and during the summer, tourists would sometimes travel out there to catch a glimpse of him or to have their photographs taken alongside him. Joe didn’t seem to mind; or if he did, it made no difference to his permanent expression of worried bafflement.

  Melancholy Joe. Macy smiled and said the name aloud.

  “Melancholy Joe.”

  Her headlights caught the sign for the interstate, the wipers striking out at the first drops of rain, and she took the north ramp.

  “Sanctuary,” she said, testing out the name. She decided she liked that name better than Dutch. “Well, it’s better than being on traffic duty.”

  Moloch lay in silence on his bunk. From a nearby television came the sound of a news bulletin, but Moloch tuned out the background noise. He had more pressing matters to consider.

  His lawyer hadn’t been able to tell him much about the grand-jury hearing when they’d met ten days before, across a bare steel table in the prison’s visiting area. “All I know is that they have a guy named Verso.”

  Moloch’s mouth twitched, but otherwise he gave no sign of his irritation. “Is Verso the target of this grand jury?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Moloch leaned in closer to the little man. “Mr. Braden, why am I paying you if you know nothing?”

  Braden didn’t back off. He knew Moloch was merely venting steam. “You finished?” he asked.

  Moloch leaned back, then nodded.

  “I’m guessing that Verso has spoken to them and offered them something in return for immunity from prosecution. Verso’s a nasty piece of work, and you’re already locked up for the foreseeable future, so it could be that the county prosecutor might like to see what you can offer them to put Verso away.”

  “What do I get in return if I testify? A cell with a view?”

  “You’ll be due for parole in eight to ten. Testifying will help your case.”

  “I don’t plan to spend another decade in jail, Mr. Braden.”

  Braden shrugged and leaned back. “Your call. I’ll be in the hallway during the proceedings. You can ask for time out as soon as you discover where their questions are leading. If in doubt, take the Fifth.”

  Moloch looked down at the table before he spoke again. “They have something,” he said. “They don’t want Verso, they want me. I’m the target.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” said Braden.

  “Yes,” said Moloch. “I do.” He placed his hands together, palm against palm. “I pay you well, Mr. Braden. You were engaged because you were smart, but don’t believe for one moment that you’re smarter than I am. I know where you live. I know your family’s movements. I know the name of the boy your daughter—”

  “You better stop—”

  “—your daughter fucks in your basement while you’re watching The West Wing. I know these things, Mr. Braden, and you, in turn, know me. I suspect that the commonwealth of Virginia has no intention of ever seeing me released. In fact, I believe that the commonwealth of Virginia has high hopes of executing me and freeing up my cell for someone else. They want capital charges. This grand-jury hearing is a trap, nothing more.”

  “I have no evidence—”

  “I don’t care about evidence. Tell me your instincts, your gut instincts. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  But Braden said nothing.

  “So there’s been talk.”

  “Rumors, suspicions,” Braden said. “Nothing more.”

  “That Verso is not the target.”

  “That Verso is not the target,” Braden echoed.

  “Have you spoken to the prosecutor?”

  “He wouldn’t agree to a meeting.”

  “If Verso was the target, he would have met with you. You could have negotiated immunity from prosecution for me. You better believe that any true bill that comes out of this will have my name on it.”

  Braden spread his hands. “I’m doing what I can.”

  Moloch wondered if Braden might be secretly happy were he to be found guilty of capital crimes. He shouldn’t have threatened the lawyer. The man
was frightened enough of him already.

  Moloch leaned in closer to his counsel. “Listen to me, Mr. Braden. I want you to remember a telephone number. Don’t write it down, just remember it.”

  Carefully and clearly, Moloch whispered the seven digits to the younger man.

  “When the details of the hearing are confirmed, I want you to call that number and pass them on. Do not call from your office. Do not call from your home. Do not use your cell phone. If you’re wise, you’ll take a day trip, maybe into Maryland, and you will make the call from there. Am I clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do this right and you’ll be free of me.”

  Braden rose and knocked on the door of the meeting room.

  “Guard,” he called, “we’re all done here.”

  He left without looking back at his client.

  Now the preparations were in place. Moloch had received a message, passed in code during an apparently innocuous telephone conversation. They were moving. Progress was being made. All would be ready when the time came.

  He closed his eyes and thought of vengeance.

  The gray-haired man sat in the Rue de la Course on North Peter, sipping coffee and reading the local throwaway. Groups of young men passed by the windows of the coffeehouse, heading for the depths of the French Quarter. He could hear a thumping bass beat coming from the Coyote Ugly bar close by, battling the light jazz being played on the sound system behind his head. He liked the Rue de la Course, preferring it to the Café du Monde, where, earlier, he had eaten beignets and listened to the street musicians trying to hustle a buck. At the Café du Monde, coffee came either black or au lait, and the gray-haired man didn’t care much for it either way. He liked it black, but with a little cold milk on the side. The Asian waitress at the Café du Monde wasn’t prepared to accommodate him, so he had been forced to take his business elsewhere. The Rue de la Course had been a fortuitous discovery. In a way, it had been recommended to him by somebody else.

  The Rue de la Course had ceiling fans and walls of what looked like beaten tin, and the tables were lit by green-shaded bankers’ lamps. He was surprised that it was still a coffeehouse, what with the money that could be made by turning it into a bar. Maybe it had been a bar once, as white lettering on the door still indicated that it sold beer and wine, although the blackboard behind the counter only listed about forty different types of coffee and tea, all iced this and mocha that. The gray-haired man, whose name was Shepherd, preferred his coffee the old way, with the minimum of milk and fuss. It didn’t bother him that he couldn’t get a drink here. Shepherd wasn’t much of a drinker. He hated the way that it made fools out of people. In fact, Shepherd had few, if any, vices. He didn’t smoke, didn’t use drugs, and his sex drive was virtually nil. He wasn’t interested in women or men, although he’d tried both just to be sure that he wasn’t missing something. Like his aversion to alcohol, it helped to keep his mind clear.