Third Rail (21 page)

“Can't believe
you're
here in Nagog,” Harkness says. “Didn't I throw you in jail?”

“They let me out when I sobered up.”

“Sorry to hear it.” Harkness waves Thom back onto the sidewalk. “Aren't you supposed to be wearing a costume?”

“Aren't you supposed to be emptying meters?”

Harkness says nothing. His Taser is in the trunk of the squad car, parked blocks away. Otherwise it might be touching Thom's soft places.

Thom follows Harkness down the street. “Sorry, sorry,” he says. “I'm kind of an asshole. Even without Third Rail. Can't help it.”

“Maybe you should try a little harder.” Thom's the human equivalent of a cover band, familiar and annoying. “So who are you today?”

“I'm not reenacting.” Thom raises an eyebrow. “I'm enacting. I'm in the moment, experiencing history in real time.”

“That sounds like grad-student talk. Why don't you just call it living?”

“Doesn't sound as impressive.”

“So watching a biotech celebrity drive by in a convertible qualifies as experiencing history?”

“Why not? We'd be watching General Gage on a white horse back in 1770. Same diff. History's just whatever people manage to remember.” Thom's digging in his backpack. “Here! This should clue you in.” He hands Harkness a dog-eared copy of
Wired
. Seth Braeburn stares from the cover, a tangle of fiberoptic cables running from his forehead. The headline screams
NEW FRONTIERS OF COGNITIVE PHARMA
.
Below it, the byline reads
Dr. Lauren North
. Harkness remembers walking through Boston, mind racing on Third Rail. Part of him wants to do it again.

“The guy's a freakin' genius,” Thom says.

“No doubt,” Harkness says. “Must be in town for the big smarty party.”

“Headless at Freedom Farm? Everyone's going to be there.”

“Except you, right? Because you're not doing drugs anymore, smart or otherwise, remember?”

Thom looks away. “Right.”

 

School's out early and the streets are packed with young kids diving for candy along the parade route and teenagers wandering around in awkward packs. Salem has its witches. Concord has the Shot Heard 'Round the World. Nagog has Headless Hallows Eve, the town's annual parade, a warm-up act for Halloween, still a couple of days away.

Vintage cars pass—two-tone turquoise Chevys, ancient black Fords, and Elvis-worthy Cadillacs—each with a gray-haired driver. They're followed by every citizen with a micron of Native American blood, wrapped in furs and beating drums. This crew is all but drowned out by the Nagog Minutemen, who march behind them with fifes and drums, faces drawn and stoic, as if they're facing a line of redcoats. Their costumes are flawless, billowing linen shirts and brown woolen trousers buttoned at the ankles over high leather boots. Not a spot of battlefield dirt on these sanitized soldiers.

The soldiers stop and shift their muskets from one shoulder to the other in unison. They aim at the cloudless sky. Their leader raises his arm and shouts. When he lowers his arm, the muskets crack. Babies cry, kids cover their ears, and Harkness's hand jerks toward the handle of his plastic pistol. He lowers his arm to his side and walks on.

Nine decapitated redcoats march in bloodied outfits, each holding his head in front of him. The younger kids in the crowd start crying when they see the sprouting cords from their severed necks, gleaming glass eyes rolling back in their heads, and blood dripping from leaf-matted hair.

A smoke-sodden, ragged Colonial woodsman steps forward and shouts, revealing blackened teeth, “Have ye heard the Legend of Nine Men's Misery?”

“No!” The crowd shouts, though of course they have. It's been part of Nagog history for hundreds of years.

The woodsman unfolds a piece of parchment to tell the tale they've all been waiting to hear.

“After the Battle of Concord, a group of nine young redcoats found themselves lost in the Nagog Woods, unsure of which direction might lead them to Boston town. There came no word from these soldiers for many weeks. Then nine heads and eighteen hands washed up in the town mill, a bloody gift from the forest.
In the trackless wilderness nine men found their fame, their red coats gone, heads and hands the same.
These are the words of the dark bard Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

The woodsman bends down to point at the kids. “No one knows who butchered them. Some say minutemen. Some say Indians. Others say the angry spirits of the forest rose up to join the battle. Just remember this, young friends, to avoid their misery.
When all seems lost, ye must keep your head about you.
” He gives a maniacal grin and walks on with his headless charges trudging in front of him.

With palpable relief, the crowd turns its attention to a squad of realtors doing synchronized briefcase drills, followed by a tae kwon do class side kicking its way down Main Street.

Dabilis leans against a light pole across the street. He raises his hand to his mouth and Harkness's radio crackles. “Officer Harkness, get moving. Up and down the whole parade route. The meters are waiting.”

“I emptied Main Street this morning,” he says.

“Empty it again.”

Harkness unloads the coin transfer unit from his squad car and pushes it along the crowded street. Sergeant Dabilis just wants to embarrass him in front of the entire town. It's worse than being in the
Nagog Journal
police blotter.

Harkness thinks that this may be the moment when he stops being a cop. He could toss his badge on the ground and walk. But letting Dabilis chase him away would be more than humiliating. Harkness keeps walking down the street, asking kids to move over so he can get to the meters. Meager handfuls of change rattle down the craw of the transfer unit. And all along the parade route, the citizens of Nagog watch his progress, their stares loaded with varying amounts of pity and scorn.

Harkness glimpses Candace between rows of marching bands and gymnasts, stroller brigades and veterans. She smiles, raises one of May's tiny hands, and waves it.

Harkness sidles up to the next meter. Candace looks away.

Further down Main, Harkness sees Dex, Mouse, and their friends sprawled on the sidewalk and staring at the parade, not with open-eyed astonishment, just the gleaming eyes of Third Rail. Outliers among the children and families, they look out of place away from their laptops. They laugh as the oldest veterans hobble past. They stare when the town manager's white Cadillac glides by, escorted by six motorcycle cops.

Dex and his friends aren't impressed or amused by anything as hokey as a small-town parade. They're just waiting for their party to start.

 

The parade ends, the balloon vendors and roasted chestnut carts move on, and the town cleanup crew starts sweeping the streets. His shift almost over, Harkness pushes the coin transfer unit toward his squad car.

“Hey!” Candace pushes May's stroller with the determination of a marathon runner. “Saw you . . .”

“Emptying meters?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Doesn't look like much fun.”

“Don't knock it till you try it,” Harkness says. “Did May like the parade?”

“Every kid likes a parade. Even if it's kind of creepy,” Candace says, then closes her eyes and starts to sob.

“Hey, what's wrong?”

“Everything.” She holds up her hand and pulls herself together.

“May looks happy. So something's going right.”

“Don't make me count my fucking blessings, Eddy,” Candace says quietly. “I know I'm lucky. It's just . . .”

“What?”

“Our house has like twenty people crammed in it. A French neuroscientist who asks annoying questions all night and complains about the food. This skinny Australian photographer who takes hundreds of Polaroids of herself naked in the woods and calls it art. Anyone with a PhD and no fucking clue.”

This sounds like good news to Harkness. If these are the kind of people going to Headless at Freedom Farm, it might turn out more like a TED conference than a drug fest.

“I'm a waitress, Eddy. This time to a bunch of smarty-pants. And I got to tell you, the tips suck. Dex is acting like a boy bridezilla right now. He could freak at any minute.”

“This party of his, it's tomorrow night?”

Candace nods.

“Be careful,” Harkness says. “Halloween always gets weird around here.”

“You talking about more than smashed pumpkins?”

“Right,” he says. “Never know what people will do given the chance.”

Candace moves closer. “These people at the house? They don't have babies. They don't know what life is really like. They're thirty and they're still in school. They listen to electronica shit. Their entire lives are in ironic quotes. They're serious about nothing. And I hate Dex for inviting them all to camp out like his stupid party is the next Woodstock or something.”

Harkness just shakes his head. With free Third Rail, the party's not going to be about peace, love, and understanding
.

“I'm really worried,” she says quietly. “These are smart people, Eddy, but fucked up. They think they know everything, but they don't know anything.”

“I'll keep an eye on the party.”

“Thank you.” Candace leans forward and kisses Harkness on the cheek, then backs away. “Sorry, forgot you were a cop for a minute.”

“That's okay, so did I.”

“I think you may be the only person I trust in this whole town.”

Harkness tries to think of what to say, something reassuring. But finding the right words is a struggle when Candace is around. And by the time they come to him, she's already walking down Elm, pushing May's stroller with her good hand.

T
HE BOATHOUSE IS CLOSED
for the season,
front gate padlocked, the chain-link fence cold on his fingers as Harkness climbs over it and walks to the stack of canoes and kayaks on the dock. He picks out a kayak and eases the bow slowly into the Nagog River.

Minutes later he's gliding along, the full moon glimmering on the dark water, low wisps of fog lofting from its surface as the night cools. Starting in the west as a wild, narrow creek, the Nagog widens and slows in the inland marshes west of town until its current is almost imperceptible. The same slow current carried the dugout canoes of the Wampanoags and Micmacs, brought the hands and heads of Nine Men's Misery floating into Nagog, and bore the bloated body of Captain Munro to the town mill.

The river takes what it's given.

After a few minutes in the kayak, Harkness sees the back of the familiar white saltbox with its plastic-covered windows gliding into view—once the Old Nagog Tavern, now Freedom Farm.

From this angle, Harkness can see a deck jutting out toward the river. It's crowded with bulging black trash bags, stacks of newspapers, and bicycles tossed in a jumbled heap.

Setting his paddle down carefully, Harkness reaches into the inside pocket of his leather jacket for the metal case. He cracks it open, takes out the digital wiretap, and points it at the cables running along the eaves of the house. In a few moments, dozens of computer screens flicker into view, stacked up like a game of solitaire.

Harkness jumps from screen to screen, looking for any shred of evidence that might link Dex to the death of Captain Munro. In the story that he tells himself, Captain Munro came to the house to tell Dex and his friends to get out. Unable to stop himself, Dex or one of his crew attacked the captain, knocked him out, then threw him off the back porch into the river to float down to the town mill.

But there's a second explanation. Maybe the captain just came to the house to get his “rent,” only to be told that another cop had already collected it. The captain accused Dex of lying and threatened him. Amped up on Third Rail, Dex and his friends shoved the captain into the river and held him under the tea-colored water.

In this version, Harkness plays a role in his father's death, a possibility that he can't even consider.

Either way, it seems likely that Dex and his friends killed the captain. With Sergeant Dabilis running the show and Detective Ramble investigating, truth and justice will be hard to find. All Harkness wants now is revenge.

 

Ten minutes of going from screen to screen tells Harkness that Headless at Freedom Farm
is going to be more than a backyard keg party. The comments stream:

 

JACCUSE:
 Who's comin?

DX1:
 Everyone.

JACCUSE:
 Costumes?

DX1:
 Course.

JACCUSE:
 Liquid inspiration?

DX1:
 Buckets of it.

 

Harkness reads on, the chatter reminding him of high school guys trying to lure girls to a party in the woods. Mouse turns confident online, more like a handsome frat boy than a pocket-sized drug dealer. Dex claims that Headless at Freedom Farm will be a
night that will change everyone's life forever
.

 

Dex's friends spill out of the house. It takes powerful detection software to spot the digital wiretap, but Freedom Farm has it now. They're staring up at the cluster of cable boxes and satellite dishes on the roof. Harkness puts the wiretap down. Before he can put his paddle in the water, he senses someone staring. Dex stands on the deck behind the house, lit by moonlight. He's wearing jeans and a rumpled white shirt. He's too far away to see Harkness in his black sweatshirt, but he can tell someone's out there. Dex starts throwing plastic chairs from the deck out into the river.

Harkness takes a full stroke along one side of the kayak, and then the other. At the sound of churning water, Dex jumps off the deck into the weeds and disappears. Harkness is already slipping down the river, each stroke moving him further from the house. Being spotted doing surveillance is bad enough; that tonight's visit is illegal makes it even worse. Harkness doesn't want to explain what he's doing on the river with an expensive wiretap and no warrant.