Bad Men (2003) (8 page)

“People who mess with cops don’t usually walk away from it so easily.”

“You see anyone rushing to defend Barron’s honor?”

“I guess not. I hear Parker’s been asking about cops.”

“Cops, rent-a-cops, private security. He’s pissing off all the wrong people.”

“You know why?”

“Case a couple of months back. Someone tried to pull a boy from the street, over in Gorham. Kid was huffing lighter fuel and was pretty much off his head to begin with, so he couldn’t recall much, but he claimed the guy was wearing a uniform under his jacket, and he thought he could see a gun. His parents have money and they’ve hired Parker to ask some questions. They’re afraid the guy might make a play again, either on their kid or someone else’s.”

Barron returned from the men’s room, and nodded a curt greeting to Odell.

“See you ’round, I guess,” Odell said to Macy. He nodded at Barron—“Eric”—then went back to his buddies

“What did he want?” asked Barron.

“Nothing, just wanted to congratulate me on finishing my six.” She could sense Barron simmering beside her. He had a short fuse, and it seemed a good idea to try to stamp it out before the powder keg ignited.

“Tell me more about the island,” she said.

Barron told her that Dutch Island, or Sanctuary as it was sometimes known, was within the jurisdiction of the Portland Police Department, despite its status as the most remote of the inhabited islands on Casco Bay. Dutch wasn’t the only island that required a police presence of this kind, but it was the least hospitable. Most Portland cops never had to spend time there. It had one resident policeman, and a couple of others who traveled out on a rotation system. On the other island policed by the Portland PD, Peaks Island, two officers headed out on a boat every day. But when the boat left for Dutch, there was often only one cop on board.

“Why has it got two names?”

“To make it sound interesting,” said Barron. “But believe me, it isn’t. What more do you want to know?”

“What’s he like?” asked Macy.

“Who?”

“You know, Dupree.”

Barron clicked his tongue in disgust. “Melancholy Joe? He’s a freak.”

“They say he’s a giant. I mean, a real giant. Like in the circus, or like that wrestler guy, the one who died.”

“Andre the Giant. No, Joe ain’t as big as Andre. Still a big son of a bitch, though. Strong, too. Nobody fucks with Melancholy Joe.”

“Why do they call him that?”

“Because he’s a miserable bastard, that’s why. Doesn’t say much, keeps to himself. You better take some books out to Dutch Island, because you sure ain’t going to be kept up nights talking to Joe.”

“You spend time out there?”

“Just once, when flu took out half of the regular guys. Didn’t care much for it. Didn’t care much for Joe Dupree, either.”

I bet it was mutual, thought Macy.

“I suppose nothing much happens out there.”

“Not a whole lot. Bored kids stealing cars, breaking into summer houses. The occasional DUI. It’s community policing, mainly.”

“But not always?”

“What do you know?” asked Barron.

“Someone said—”

“Who?”

“Just someone. He said Joe Dupree once killed a man out on the island.”

Barron made that clicking sound again. “Yeah, he killed one of the Lubey brothers. Ronnie Lubey. If he’d been a little faster, then maybe his partner might not have taken a load of buckshot in the leg. Lubey was drunk, Dupree and Snowman arrived—”

“Snowman?”

“Yeah, dumb fucking name for a dumb guy. If he’d taken the buckshot in the head, it probably would have done him less damage. Anyway, Dupree and him arrive, Snowman gets shot, and Dupree kills Ronnie Lubey. He was taken off duty for a while, but the investigation cleared him. That’s it. Nobody shed too many tears for old Ronnie. He was a bad one. His brother still lives out on Dutch. He hates Joe Dupree like wood hates fire.”

Barron paused. He felt dumb saying what he was about to say, as if Macy was going to laugh at him or call him a liar, but when he’d joined the force, his first partner, Tom Huyler, had sat him down over a beer and told him pretty much what he was about to tell Macy, and old Huyler wasn’t the type to joke around. He was Dutch Protestant, and when those people cracked a smile, it was like watching Arctic ice break, but Huyler knew his history. After all, they were some of his people that went out there in the beginning.

His people who were slaughtered.

Because, sure, Dutch Island was quiet, most of the time. There was the odd domestic dispute, the occasional drunk that tried to drive up a tree. But he recalled Huyler telling him the story of the first settlers on the island, how they’d retreated out there after skirmishes with the local Indians in the late 1600s.

Then, according to the history books, there was some internal dispute among the islanders, and somebody had been banished. He’d come back, though, and he brought others with him. The entire population—ten, twelve families, all with children—had been slaughtered. It was only in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years that people had started returning to Dutch in numbers, and now the community was large enough to need full-time cops out there.

And sometimes, people went missing. They were the bad ones, mostly. That was the odd thing about it. They were the ones that were no use to anybody, not even to their own families. They were the fighters, the abusers, the wife beaters. True, not all of them went that way, and Dutch still had its share of bad sorts, but they tended to be pretty careful about where they walked and what they did. They didn’t stray too far from their homes and they stayed away from the woods at the center of the island, and far away from what was known as the Site, the burial place of the original settlers.

Huyler was dead now, died of a heart attack two years before, but Barron could still see him sitting there, a glass of beer in his hand, talking in those soft tones of his, the occasional strange intonation creeping into his speech, a relic of his family’s heritage. Barron had never doubted a word that he had said, not even when he’d told him about his final tour on Dutch Island, and the death of George Sherrin. Because George Sherrin was the reason Dutch’s less salubrious residents didn’t go walking in the woods at night anymore. Nobody wanted to go the way old George had, no sir.

There had always been talk about the Sherrins. Their kids were rebellious and educationally subnormal, real difficult types. Old Frank Dupree, Melancholy Joe’s father, had been forced on more than one occasion to haul one or the other of the Sherrin kids back to his old man and tell him how the kid had been caught breaking windows or tormenting some poor dumb animal, and the kid would be quiet as he was led back to the house, and Frank would always feel a tug at his belly as the kid was led inside by George and the door closed silently behind them. Frank suspected that there was something going on there, something vile and rotten, but he could never convince Sherrin’s mousy wife, Enid, to talk, and any social workers who ever went near the Sherrins risked getting a gun waved at them or had to run to escape the dogs barking at their heels.

And then, one day, George Sherrin went missing. He didn’t come home from a trip out into the woods, his truck loaded up with a saw and chains so he could do a little illegal cutting and collect some cheap fuel for the winter. It was two days before his wife bothered to report it, and Frank Dupree figured that if she hadn’t killed him herself, then maybe she was just relieved to have two days without his presence in the house, because if George Sherrin was doing bad things to his children, Frank didn’t doubt that his wife knew about it, and that maybe she tried to get him to do bad things to her instead on occasion, just to give the kids a break.

So Frank Dupree and Tom Huyler had made their way into the woods, and after a few hours they’d found George Sherrin’s truck, and beside it George’s saw. There was a gash in a big pine tree nearby, where George had just started cutting, but then something seemed to have interrupted him, because he never got to finish his task. They had a good look around for George, but there was no trace of him. Later they came back with twenty islanders and they formed a line through the forest and scoured the bushes and the trees, but George was gone. After a few days, they stopped looking. After a few weeks, they stopped caring. George’s kids started getting on better in school and a social worker began calling at the house, and then a couple of times a month, Enid Sherrin and the kids took the little ferry over to the mainland and got to talk things through with a doctor who had Crayolas in her drawer and a box of Kleenex on her desk.

One year later, a bad storm hit the coast, and Dutch, being right out there, took the brunt of it. There was thunder, and two trees were felled by lightning bolts, and under one of those trees they found George Sherrin. The pine had been torn partway out of the ground but its fall was arrested by the surrounding trees so that its broad root structure gaped like a toothed mouth. In the hollow that it left in the ground, George Sherrin’s remains were discovered, and a murder investigation was initiated. There was no visible damage to his bones—no breaks, no fractures, no entry wounds—but somebody must have put George Sherrin under that tree because he sure hadn’t dug himself a hole beneath it and then covered himself up. They took Enid Sherrin in and quizzed her some, but she had her kids to back her up and they all told the same story. Their momma had been with them the whole time after their daddy disappeared. Who else was going to look after them?

There were more puzzles for the investigators to mull over. When the tree and the bones were analyzed, the results made no sense. The way the experts figured it, George Sherrin would have to have been buried under there for thirty years for the roots to grow through his bones the way they had, for they had curled around and through him as if holding him in place. But George Sherrin had been missing for only one year, and there was just no way to account for that degree of growth. No, there had to be some other explanation for the nature of the root spread.

Except nobody had ever come up with one.

“That’s the story,” said Barron.

Macy looked at him closely to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

“You say other people have disappeared?”

“
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.”