A Song of Shadows (12 page)

Louis considered the matter, and decided that it was less a reflection on Portland’s tattoo artists than on the kind of people who came to it, possibly hoping to have something done about their fucked-up tattoos.

The couple moved on – or, more correctly, the man moved on quickly, the woman hot on his trail, still yelling, still hitting him with the boot.

‘Lot of fucked-up people,’ said Angel, again.

‘Colorful, though.’

‘It has its charms.’

They had rented an apartment in Portland’s East End, once again in order to be near Charlie Parker. When first they’d done so, he had seemingly been dying in a hospital bed. Now he was recovering in Boreas. They had considered finding somewhere closer to him, maybe even in Boreas itself, but he’d made it clear that he didn’t want them hovering over him like a pair of demented Florence Nightingales. He didn’t mind them coming up to see him, but even then he wasn’t prepared to have them stay under his roof. Two lesser men might have been hurt by this, but Angel and Louis were familiar with pain and suffering, and the various ways in which individuals coped with it. Whatever Parker was enduring as he worked his way back to health, he did not want others to witness it. He would present a face to the world, but he would do so on his own terms.

So Angel and Louis stayed more and more in Portland, and they missed Manhattan less than either of them would admit to the other. Portland was curious and colorful. All right, so an attempt by the American Planning Association to categorize Congress Street as one of the ten greatest streets in the nation took a little time to digest. They had also decided that Portland was growing hotels like mushrooms, without much thought of who might fill those rooms come winter, seeing as how even most of the city’s residents didn’t want to be there come December and January. Any time they raised this question, someone would mention ‘cruise liners,’ although any cruise liner hoping to dock in Portland in the depths of winter might need to hire an icebreaker first, and the last time they checked, the whole point of cruise liners was that you got to sleep on the boat. It wasn’t like the liner dumped you on dry land and then floated away, like some Robinson Crusoe outfit with all the crew laughing their asses off as you signaled for help from the dock. Portland was also playing host to a couple of restaurants that, even in New York, would cause a man to shake the check at the end of the night, just in case a zero might drop off the end.

But all these were objects of bemusement, and no more. Each understood, too, that their fates were now tied up with this place, and with the detective to whom both were bound by bonds of loyalty, affection, and – whisper it, but do not speak it aloud, and certainly not to each other – the inevitability of their own deaths.

They had been out to check on Parker’s house in Scarborough. Its doors remained secured, the alarm system had been upgraded, and they had arranged for his more valuable possessions to be placed in secure storage. His computers and his files had been carefully boxed by Louis’s people, then removed to a warehouse in Queens, and locked away under the name ‘Nemesis, Inc.’ Louis had the utmost confidence in the security of the warehouse, since he owned it (although any lawyer would have trouble proving as much) and stored most of his weapons there (and here, once again, the question of ownership remained nebulous, to say the least).

They had not yet broached the subject with Parker, but they doubted that he would be returning to the house that overlooked the Scarborough marshes. In their opinion, it would be hard for him to resume his life in a home in which he might no longer feel secure. Parker’s defenses had been breached not only physically, but psychologically too. He could never have the same faith as he once had in his home’s capacity to withstand intrusion, perhaps not even in his own ability to defend himself, or so they believed.

On a practical level, the house had appeared on news bulletins and in newspaper reports. The address and location were familiar to many people now. Angel and Louis were under no illusion that the detective’s enemies had not previously known where to find him, should they have wanted to act against him. Even the fact that some of them had, at last, succeeded in wounding him so severely was not, to these men, entirely a surprise. No, what mattered was that the site of his home was now general knowledge. News reports linked to it via Google Maps. If he went back there, what peace would he have, even if he somehow managed to overcome the psychological and emotional difficulties of living in a dwelling in which he had almost met his death – in which he had, in fact, technically died before being resuscitated for the first of three times.

Then there was also the question of what kind of man he would be. He had nerve damage to his left hand. One kidney had been removed. They had dug so many shotgun pellets out of his skull and his back that the surgeons had filled two glass dishes with them. Sometimes, when speaking, he would forget a name, or misidentify an object. Once, over coffee in Boreas, he asked Angel to pass him a ‘bell.’

‘A bell?’ asked Angel.

‘Yes, a bell. A little bell. To add to my coffee.’

And as Angel had grown more confused, so Parker had grown more frustrated, until at last he stood up, walked behind Angel, and grabbed a creamer of skim milk for himself.

‘See?’ he said. ‘Bell!’

Then, moments later, as he read the words on the side of the creamer, he seemed to realize what he had done, and began to apologize, but his voice broke, and all they could do was watch as he tried to hold back tears of rage and shame.

Was this the end of them, Angel wondered? Was this to be the final, undignified conclusion, the grand anticlimax? A broken Parker, living on whatever he could make by selling his house and its surrounding land and moving into a small apartment somewhere, supported – when required, and only if it could be discreetly done – by his friends? Dave Evans, of course, would give him a bartending job at the Great Lost Bear, but what if, like confusing the words – if not the concepts – of milk and bell, he proved unable to function?

And there were moments when Angel and Louis found it hard even to conceive of Parker doing what he once did, hunting the worst of men. They had trusted in his strength, in his knowledge, in his ability to understand situations that seemed only smoke and shadows to them. How could they stand with him if he could not be relied upon to watch their backs, to come to their aid if they were in trouble?

But at other times Angel would look at Parker, and see fires coldly burning behind his eyes, and in that instant he could make himself believe that all was not lost.

‘What will we do about him?’ said Angel, as soft rain began to fall, and Louis did not need to ask to whom he was referring.

‘We’ll wait,’ he replied, ‘and we’ll see.’

14

C
ory Bloom arrived at Olesens – and the absence of that damned apostrophe bothered her too – shortly after ten to find Parker already seated at a table by the window at the back of the store. He hadn’t heard her enter, and she saw that he was holding an object in his left hand. It looked like a red rubber ball, the kind office workers used for stress relief, but as she drew closer she saw it had dark loops that hooked around the fingers. She thought that she’d seen something resembling it in a sporting goods store at the Bangor Mall, when she’d gone to look for new sneakers. It was in the climbing section alongside the ropes and crampons and carabiners: a grip strengthener. The effort of squeezing it showed on his face. He winced with each compression, but did not stop until he saw her reflected in the glass, at which point he slipped the strengthener into his pocket.

‘Is it working?’ she asked.

‘It hurts, so I have to hope so.’

She took a seat across from him. He already had coffee, alongside a copy of the
New York Times
, although he didn’t yet appear to have opened the newspaper.

‘Is it to do with what happened?’

‘Shotgun pellets,’ he said. ‘I sustained nerve damage to the hand, and some fracturing of the bones. I’ve had surgery, but it’s about maintaining range of motion and muscle tone. The physio is helping. Massage works too.’

‘Are you asking?’

‘Are you offering?’

‘People might talk.’

‘Not least your husband.’

‘I’m sure he’d understand, if it was for medical reasons.’

‘I’m sure he wouldn’t.’

‘You’re probably right.’

Were they flirting? Bloom couldn’t recall the last time she had flirted with anyone. She didn’t even flirt with her husband. There didn’t seem to be much point.

Larraine Olesen came over and took her coffee order. Bloom thought that Larraine might inadvertently have overheard them. She just about managed to keep herself from grinning, but it was a hard-fought battle. Bloom was relieved when she left to make the coffee.

‘Do you mind if I ask how you are otherwise?’ said Bloom.

He looked away.

‘Aches and pains, mostly,’ he said. ‘I had some …
discomfort
after they removed the kidney, but it went away after a week or two. I get headaches. A lot of headaches. I sustained tissue damage to my back, some shattered ribs, a broken clavicle, a couple of holes where there shouldn’t have been any. They’ve done some skin grafts, which hurt like nothing on earth, and there’ll be more to come, but I’ve had enough of them for now.

‘I’m weaker than I was. That’s the worst of it. I get tired quickly. Nauseous, too. I lost my balance on the beach a couple of days ago, and if it wasn’t for the Winter kid coming along I might still have been there when the tide came in. And it’s the strangest thing, but sometimes I have trouble with words. I’ll look at something, and I’ll know what it is – a table, a chair, a book – but when I try to describe it, another word entirely comes out. It happened a lot at the start, less often now, but it’s frustrating. And embarrassing.’

He faced her once again.

‘More than you needed to know?’

‘No – and I did ask. You shoot with your right hand?’

‘Yes, but I haven’t held a gun much since that night.’

‘Are you planning to again?’

‘I haven’t given it much thought.’

She saw something then – a flicker – and knew that he was lying. What would it do to a man’s confidence to find himself on the verge of being butchered in his own home, lying in his own blood, his body torn by fragments of metal? His recovery would not only have to be physical, but psychological and emotional too. Heading out to Mason Point, and examining Bruno Perlman’s car, might be considered a version of that grip improver: a means to test, strengthen …

Her cappuccino arrived. Larraine had attempted some kind of art with the foam, but it hadn’t worked out. It might have been a heart, or a smiley face. It might have been nothing at all. Larraine moved quickly away, well out of earshot. She knew better than to try and eavesdrop on the chief. Actually, she wasn’t really the kind to eavesdrop at all, which made her unusual in Boreas. When she died, they could have her stuffed and mounted as a behavioral model for others.

‘So,’ Bloom began, as she tried her coffee.

‘There were no maps in the car,’ said Parker.

‘No, there weren’t.’

‘Does that trouble you?’

‘Not really. Does anyone even use paper maps anymore?’

‘I do.’

‘Seriously?’

‘I like knowing where I’ve been, and where I’m going, not just where I am. Also, there are times when it’s better not to leave a record of where you’ve been.’

‘Are you admitting to the commission of a crime?’

‘How long have you got?’

‘You ever hear of a guy named Boris Cale?’

‘It rings a bell, but I can’t say why.’

‘He killed his ex’s new boyfriend down in Providence, Rhode Island a year or two ago. He didn’t know the city so he put the guy’s address into his GPS. He was found so fast that the blood hadn’t dried on the floor when the cops arrested him.’

‘A salutary lesson. Back to Perlman: in theory someone could follow 95 all the way from Florida to Maine.’

‘Only as far as Houlton.’

‘And this isn’t Houlton.’

‘It’s prettier than Houlton.’

‘Not difficult.’

‘No, not really,’ said Parker. ‘Anything on a phone?’

‘I’ve asked the sheriff’s department down in Duval County to take a look at Perlman’s apartment, see if they can find any records, or any sign of a laptop or desktop computer. If we confirm his phone details, we can see about contacting the phone company to find out who he might have called recently, especially anyone up here. They’ll probably ask for a court order, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘It’s still odd that he didn’t have an atlas, or even just a state map, the kind they give away at the information centers when you cross the state line.’

‘He could have been using a GPS app on his phone,’ said Bloom.

‘Assuming he had one.’

‘He was a male in his forties. He might have been an exception, but it’s probably a safe guess that he owned a phone.’

‘Which, if he walked into that water, he took with him?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Who needs a phone if he’s going to commit suicide by drowning?’ said Parker. ‘And I noticed something on his windshield. I could be wrong, but it was a circular mark on the glass, the kind left by the sucker attachment on one of those grips for a phone or a GPS. I only spotted it because it was cleaner than the rest of the windshield. Did you find anything like that in the car?’

‘If we did, then it would have been on the list. No, there was nothing like it.’

‘Again,’ said Parker, ‘what kind of suicide takes the holder for his phone or GPS with him when he steps into the sea? He wasn’t going to need GPS to find where he was going.’

Bloom shifted in her seat. It wasn’t that she’d exactly wanted Perlman’s death to be a suicide, but if it wasn’t, it was going to make life in Boreas very complicated. And there was the other thing, the one she hadn’t yet mentioned to this man …

‘He had a series of numbers tattooed on his left forearm,’ said Bloom. ‘Lloyd Kramer found them when he was bagging his clothing. I didn’t mention it to you before. I mean, I …’