Third Rail (24 page)

Harkness presses his eyes closed.

Mach nods to his crew. Shinyman, white bandage over his missing earlobe, gives Harkness a hard stare as he unshackles him.

Mach sits on a windowsill, smoking a cigarette while rain clicks against the glass. Three thugs stand in front of the door, all mirrored shades and attitude.

“You cause a lot of trouble for me,” Mach says. “But now it's over.”

“If you came for your money, I don't have it.” Harkness nods at the destroyed loft. “Guess you figured that out.”

“I know who has my money,” Mach says. “I'll get it back.”

“Good luck with that.” By now, Thalia's probably in New York.

“Love may make you blind, Edward. But it doesn't have to make you stupid. You've been played. Not the first time a man's been fooled by a piece of ass. And such a fine one. We'll have to compare notes sometime.”

Harkness pulls his Glock from his waistband. The goons laugh.

“We gave you back your gun.” Mach smiles. “But not the bullets. Do you think we are stupid?”

Harkness puts his gun back.

Mach stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill. “That tattoo of a red hummingbird just above her magnificent ass? Paid for it myself.” A meaty rot wafts from Mach's yellow teeth.

“Good for you.”

“I invest in people, Edward,” Mach says. “That's my work.”

“That's what you call it?” Harkness almost laughs.

Mach nods.

“So that's what you're doing out in Nagog? Investing in people? People who make drugs?”

“I invest in clever young people, in entrepreneurs. No matter where they are. That boy, Dex? He is smart, like a scientist. But wrong idea,” Mach says. “People take drugs to forget, not to remember. Third Rail is interesting, but a niche product. And too expensive.”

“So you're not selling it?”

Mach shakes his head. “Absolutely not. Waste of time.”

Harkness stares at Mach until he looks away. Maybe he's more interested in Third Rail than he's letting on. “You found the thumb drive,” he says. “What else do you want?”

“What everyone wants. Friends who are willing to help me.”

Harkness says nothing.

“Consider your situation, Harkness. You lost girlfriend. You lost respect. You lost job. You need help from powerful people.”

“You mean like Councilman John Fitzgerald?”

Mach shakes his head. “Not him.”

“Thought you were friends.”

“Connections. Thought he might be of use. But too angry and arrogant. He will never be mayor. I'm sure of it.”

Harkness takes a moment to register this shift in alliances. “So what do you really want from me, Mach?”

“You helped erase history like it never happened, make a big problem a very small one.” Mach holds up the thumb drive. “Now I need you to solve another problem—your friend Commissioner Lattimore.”

“No way.” Harkness shakes his head.

“The way I see it, you don't really have much of a choice.” Mach nods at his three goons. “My ruthless young friends will slice your handsome face to shreds like they did to our mutual friend Jeet. By the way, he was screaming for you when he was getting cut to pieces—starting with that unfortunate blue Mohawk,” Mach says. “Such a shame. Could happen to you.”

Harkness feels sick.

“Or to your sister. Nora, right? And your crazy mother. Out in Nagog.”

“Leave them out of this.”

“You'll agree to help, then?”

“Help what?”

“When you're back in Boston, get Lattimore to back off. Let me know if they're investigating me. Or about to raid my club. That's all I'm asking.”

Harkness closes his eyes.

“I know what you're thinking, Harkness. You're thinking about integrity. About how you don't want to make a deal with the devil. But I'm no devil. I'm just very good businessman. A businessman who just gave you your gun back.”

Harkness doesn't point out that Mach stole it in the first place. Mach is about loyalty, not logic.

“One more thing you should know, Harkness,” Mach says. “You like photos so much, you should see a couple of these.”

One the goons flips open his cell phone and shoves it toward Harkness. A man with a bullet blast over one eye is folded in a fifty-gallon drum half filled with cement. In the foreground, someone holds a matte-black Glock so close to the camera that Harkness can see the scratch on the grip.

“While we had your gun, we put it to good use,” Mach says. “This is Mr. Rick Ridell, who failed to pay me the five thousand dollars he borrowed for gambling. Here he is on his way to Georges Bank to do some deep-sea fishing. Very deep.”

The goon swipes to the next photo, showing a beautiful young girl with caramel skin, her eyes wide-open, narrow chest a red wash of blood dotted with darker rips where the bullets entered. Again, a hand dangles his Glock in the foreground. Harkness shuts his eyes.

“This girl ran away after we welcomed her here from Thailand and gave her a job and a place to live. Ingrateful!”

“Why are you showing me these?”

“Wait, there are more!” Mach waves at the goon with the phone.

“That's enough.”

“Okay. But know this—your gun means nothing,” Mach says. “What you do with it is what's important. Like your heart and mind. When you are back in Boston you must be thankful, Harkness, in your deeds if not your words,” Mach says. “Otherwise, we show them what your gun did when it was on vacation. And you'll have a lot to explain.”

Harkness says nothing.

Mach crushes his cigarette on the windowsill and steps away, brushing dust from his blue pinstriped suit. “When we track down Thalia in New York, I'll tell her that you send your love. Because, really, what do we have, Harkness? It's not drugs and sex. And it's not guns or money or power. Those things are temporary. It's the love of our friends and family, Detective Harkness. That is what keeps us alive.”

Mach strides through the debris, his men following. Their footsteps echo in the worn, dusty stairwell.

Harkness gets up from the floor and looks down at the street. A green Mercedes sedan idles at the curb, the car a respected businessman might drive—powerful but not flashy. As his driver pulls out, Mach looks up at the window and gives Harkness a crisp salute.

***

The afternoon fades over the South End. Harkness walks around the loft, stepping over splintered furniture and torn canvases, smashed bottles and piles of clothes. His ribs ache and his head throbs. He picks up a cardboard box and gathers up a couple of his shirts.

He wonders where Thalia is now, realizes that he has no idea. The lover you shouldn't love, the golden drug that can kill you, the money you shouldn't touch—there's no explanation for misplaced desire. And no antidote but time.

He finds a small canvas, untrampled by the goons. Thalia called the painting
Night Swimmer,
though there isn't any swimmer, just a red and brown river that reminds Harkness of the sickly canal behind the loft. The river is thick with clumps of green and black, some crossed out, others left alone. Thalia called them the
murk
—plans that never happen, songs you hate but can't forget, memories you can't leave behind, habits you can't shake, lost things that never get found.

He turns it over and sees
To Eddy
written along the bottom edge. He puts the painting in the cardboard box and moves on, knowing that their paths will cross again, like wires after a storm.

***

Harkness finds a hammer among the scattered debris. He counts seven floorboards from the wall, kneels on the loft floor, shoves the claw between two wide boards, and pulls up a floorboard with the metallic shriek of nails giving up.

In the narrow hollow below wait a dozen mailing envelopes, each stamped and addressed, old-style, to the
Boston Globe, Boston Herald,
the Massachusetts Attorney General, and others who might find the hidden past of mayoral front-runner John Fitzgerald newsworthy.

In each envelope waits a thumb drive identical to the one Mach's goons managed to find in the medicine cabinet, the most obvious hide ever. And on each thumb drive wait the high-res files of Jeet's photos, too incendiary to be explained away by press conferences and spin.

Mach may be a good businessman and a rich man, but he should know that no one buys just one thumb drive. They buy them by the dozen. Memory gets cheaper by the day.

Harkness scoops up the envelopes and puts them in his cardboard box. He was going to wait until closer to Election Day to drop these envelopes in the mail, but now seems like a better time.

He leaves the door open behind him. Thalia's loft is over, like a stage set when the show closes and the actors move on.

H
ARKNESS WALKS FROM
meter to meter, r
olling the coin transfer unit down the sidewalk past fairies carried by their mothers and ghosts in strollers. It's early afternoon but the youngest kids are already getting ready for Halloween night. After Salem, Nagog is known as the best place to be on Halloween—a creepy history, great costumes, and rich people who give away lots of candy.

His safe hometown seems fraught with new danger. When a green Mercedes pulls to the curb, Harkness is sure it holds Mr. Mach's crew. Instead, it lets off a gang of jabbering teenagers dressed like slutty witches. When he passes the Nagog Bakery, every scruffy young stranger who walks out is Dex, Mouse, or one of their friends. The weight of his gun in its holster does little to reassure Harkness.

His cell phone rings when he gets to the end of Main.

It's Nora. “George says you're a mess.”

“That's his opinion.”

“So you're okay?”

“Not really.”

“What's the problem?”

“I'm still emptying meters.”

“Maybe you just need to take a break from Nagog for a while.”

“Sounds good. And unlikely.” He looks at the redbrick storefronts of Main Street, explored with Nora and George until they knew every alley and trail, the secret cut-throughs and hideouts. He's across the street from where Colonial CDs used to be, during a time that seems impossibly long ago.

“You'll be back in Boston soon.”

“Maybe.” Harkness wonders if he'll ever escape Nagog.

“You got your gun back, right?”

“Yes, but . . .” He moves his right hand to touch his gun like a scrap of bone in a reliquary.

“But what?”

“Got some serious loose ends floating around.”

“Then tie them up.” His sister's matter-of-fact tone sounds like their mother before she drifted away.

“Easier said than done.”

“Coming over tonight? There'll be plenty of trick-or-treaters if the storm holds off. And I'm making dinner.”

“What're you cooking?”

“Gnocchi with marinara sauce. Thought it would look kind of bloody and scary.”

“Save me a plate,” Harkness says. “There's something I need to check out tonight.”

“Crime scene?”

“Hope not.”

***

Sergeant Dabilis, Debbie the dispatcher, and Harkness are on night duty at headquarters. The wind is picking up but not the rain, so the Halloween crowds are out in force. The usual calls come in—roving bands of teenagers causing predictable mayhem, smashed pumpkins, a couple of porch fires. When the nor'easter hits later tonight, there'll be power lines down, cars skidding on wet leaves, and worse. But that's for the next shift.

“Doing your homework, Harkness?”

“Finishing up some reports.” Harkness doesn't look up. He's sitting as far as he can get from Sergeant Dabilis's office as he finalizes his meter tallies, the kind of paperwork that makes cops hate being cops.

“Well, make sure you're paying attention,” Sergeant Dabilis says. “We need to know exactly how many quarters you collected today. You should be able to get it right. Just check the math a couple of times.”

Harkness says nothing.

Debbie shoots him an apologetic look.

Since the captain's death, Sergeant Dabilis has escalated from annoying to amoral. He's been lording his provisional power over every other cop, dispatcher, detective, and administrative aide in Nagog. Three cops have already quit after showdowns with the Sweathog. Tonight, Harkness is tempted to become the fourth.

Sergeant Dabilis walks into the captain's once-elegant office, which now looks like a Red Sox gear shop on Yawkey Way. Tonight he'll be typing doctored crime stats into an enormous spreadsheet and watching his favorite plays from the ESPN archives.

His shift over, Harkness is about to leave the station. He sets aside his reports and checks on Dex's big party. From what he can tell online, the party is happening now and it's awesome and outrageous but hardly life changing. It's good news that this loose end isn't unraveling.

A few minutes later, Harkness gets a text from Candace.

 

GET HR NOW DEXS FRKNG. HAS MAY.

 

Harkness pulls on his jacket and walks toward the door.

Debbie looks up. “Heading home?”

“Checking on a disturbance.”

“Where?”

“Edge of town, Forest Road.”

“Call in if you need anything,” she says.

“Yeah, call in if you need help shutting up a barking dog or something,” Sergeant Dabilis shouts from his office without even looking up.

***

The squad car hits ninety on the straight stretch of road to the Nagog Woods. Light rain flares in his headlights and the Buzzcocks blare from the speakers. Harkness drives ahead until the road clogs with parked cars—a clever way to keep the party inaccessible to anyone but insiders.

He backs out and drives to a narrow trail that shadows Forest Road, then speeds down it, squad car bouncing off rocks and ruts. When he sees something moving on the trail ahead, Harkness slows. Dozens of deer run toward him. They crowd past the squad car, hooves and antlers clicking against the metal. Eyes wild, frantic, they leap past his window and trample the underbrush as they flee.