The Inn, Page 3

  “Winley!” I put my knee in his fleshy back to get his attention. “You’re caught, buddy. Give it up!”

  The kid growled and howled a bit and then burst into tears. “Don’t let them take me!”

  “Who’s going to take you?”

  “The doctors. The scientists.”

  “This kid is whacked,” I told Nick. Typical newbie drug taker shuffling through emotions, grasping at anything. He was crying like a toddler, huffing and sniffing. I sat him up in the glass and cereal and mess on the floor and Nick and I watched as he sobbed into his hands, the ferocious rampaging killer suddenly reduced to a blubbering child.

  “Don’t tell my mom,” he cried. He’d obviously completely forgotten that he’d manhandled her only minutes earlier. “Oh God. I’ve gotta clean this place up before she gets back!” He tried to get up. I shoved him down.

  “Winley, what did you take?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t—” The sobs racked his big body. “They’re coming for me!”

  “He’s on something,” I told Nick. “This doesn’t look like the joy and exuberance of glorious youth.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Don’t call the police!” Winley said.

  “He is the police, son.” Nick grabbed Winley’s big shoulder and shook him.

  Winley wasn’t giving up. He cried and begged us to keep his mother out of it, his dazed state blocking out the reality of what he had done. I stood and walked into the living room, where I saw through the smashed window that neighbors were gathering to console Ellie Minnow on the immaculate lawn. Derek Minnow was in the room, sitting in an armchair by the big kicked-in television set. Winley had knocked pictures off their hooks, punched holes in the drywall.

  “I’m so tired of this.” Derek looked up at me. A hopeless father.

  “This is a regular thing?”

  “We knew he’d been smoking weed. But it’s never been this bad.”

  “I’ve got news for you, Derek,” I said. “This ain’t weed.”

  I returned to the kitchen, saw Nick trying to talk Winley out of his mumblings about scientists and doctors. I went to the kid’s room and looked in. Curtains drawn, clothes on the floor two feet deep, an unmade bed, and a strange damp feeling to everything. Typical teenage bedroom except for the burn marks on the cluttered desk under the window and the scraps of aluminum foil and cigarette lighters. There were cans of beans lined up on the windowsill and empty ones stacked in the bin by the door.

  I lifted some of the trash off the boy’s desk and found a small yellow capsule with a smiley face printed on it. I turned the pill in my fingers, shook it, heard powder shift inside.

  Nick appeared at the bedroom door and started picking shards of glass out of his palms like they were cactus needles. “What do you think?” he asked. “Crack?”

  “PCP, maybe,” I said. “If it was crack, he’d be walking around town knocking over fire hydrants. Angel dust makes you burrow. Explains his aversion to going to school. He’s been living in his little nest in here where he feels safe.”

  I showed him the capsule. He took it and looked at it.

  “Did he say where he got it?” I asked.

  “He says he got it at school,” Nick said, giving the capsule back to me. “A kid on a bike gave it to him for free. I don’t know how true that is. He thinks some doctors are about to abduct him in a van. Here.” He gave me a small piece of paper with a number scrawled on it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Don’t know.” Nick shrugged. “I asked him where the drugs came from and he told me about the kid on the bike and handed me that. I checked his phone. He dialed this number this morning at about eight.”

  “Let’s chase it down,” I said. “I was looking for something to do with my day.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WE DROVE BACK to the house on the edge of the water, both of us silent, thoughtful. Hilly, seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts, sticks out like a thumb into the cold and unforgiving North Atlantic; it’s a place of windswept stone beaches and pretty winter trees. The town swells in tourist season, but it doesn’t have the pull of Manchester-by-the-Sea, with its glossy storefronts full of work by local artists, or Salem, with its rich, dark history. Roughness comes to Gloucester in hockey season, when Bruins fans pressed too tight into bars built hundreds of years ago get emotional and take the fight from the screen to the beer-soaked boards. It’s not a drug-dealer town. It’s not a PCP-and-teenage-violence town. Nick and I didn’t say it, but we knew that what we’d just seen didn’t belong here.

  As I pulled up to the house, I winced for the thousandth time at its condition. The Inn on the edge of the water was old and battered and needed work. Siobhan had been excited about redecorating it, constantly coming home with fabric samples and carpet swatches and those little color cards you get from the paint shop. Even though Siobhan lived here only a few months, she’d left her warm, gentle touch on the place. She’d painted the kitchen a sky blue and filled it with hanging ferns and she’d replaced the back-splash herself, swearing like a sailor and cursing the world, apparently a requirement when she performed any manual labor. When she slipped into the shower with me in the evenings, I’d pick lumps of grout and paint out of her hair, and she’d tell me about her plans for the loft, her major project. That was going to be our place, our sanctuary. She wanted to put a skylight in and open the nailed-shut windows so we could hear the lapping of the waves on the sand as we fell asleep at night.

  I hadn’t been up to the loft since she died. I lived in the basement and refused almost all maintenance requests from long- and short-term guests who stayed at the house. The plants in the kitchen were overgrown, the plumbing was shot, and the boards on the back porch creaked like an ancient pirate ship.

  When we arrived, the house handywoman, Effie Johnson, was crouched by the basement window, sanding and scraping, preparing to paint the house exterior—something I’d forbidden. About twice a week Effie confronted me with a can of paint Siobhan left behind, sunflower yellow, and tapped it sternly with her finger, making a tok-tok-tok sound on the lid.

  “Nope,” I always told her. “Not this week.”

  I let Effie do some things. She mows the lawns, chops firewood, cleans, repairs broken furniture, and keeps the possums out of the basement in exchange for her rent. She does a good job, but the main reason I like her is that someone tried to kill her once, slashing her throat from ear to ear and making mincemeat of her voice box, so she can’t talk at all and thus can’t ask me about my grief, how I’m coping, whether I’d like to share my feelings about my dead wife.

  When Nick and I approached, Effie looked up at us, then picked up the paint can from beside her, which she must have had waiting in case I came around. She rapped her knuckles on the lid.

  “Maybe next week,” I said. “You seen Clay?”

  She made a sleeping motion with her hands under her cheek. Then she gestured at the cuts and grazes Nick and I had acquired in the tango with Winley Minnow, questioning.

  “Just a bit of good old-fashioned kid wrangling.” Nick made fighting fists and slow-punched Effie in the ribs until she pushed him off. We told Effie about the situation and she tugged on an earlobe, thinking.

  She made a typewriter motion and pointed to the house, and I nodded.

  “What is that?” Nick asked. “Piano?”

  “Typewriter.” I started walking. “She means we should go ask Susan.”

  “When are you gonna learn proper sign language?” Nick asked Effie. Effie raised her middle finger over her shoulder and went back to work.

  I don’t know what brought Susan Solie and Effie Johnson to the house or what their history together is. They came not long after Siobhan was killed and asked for cheap permanent rooms, and I knew right away they were not what they seemed. The jagged scar across the beautiful black woman’s throat was enough to tell me she had a past, and I’d glimpsed her in her room doing chin-ups on a stee
l bar she’d erected near the windows; the bed was made impossibly tight, with razor-sharp hospital corners, and the shelves were completely bare of possessions. Susan was ex-FBI and didn’t mind admitting it. She explained that she had moved into town after taking early retirement. She’d shrugged when I’d asked about her friend Effie and her mildly psychopathic living habits.

  Nick and I trudged into the dining room, where Susan was working on her laptop, writing articles for the local rag. I pushed the laptop closed and Susan gave an exaggerated sigh as Nick sat down beside her.

  “We need you,” I said.

  “What are you two bozos up to now?” she asked, picking up a mug of coffee and sipping it while she looked us over. “I’m on deadline here.”

  “Deadline?” Nick flipped Susan’s blond ponytail. “What happens if you miss the cutoff? The crab wranglers of Gloucester won’t have their weather report this week? Oh, wait, you’ve got a big scoop—yarn-store sale this Saturday, twenty percent off crochet hooks.”

  Susan gave Nick a withering look. Next to her computer was a sheet of paper she’d been using to design the newspaper’s weekly crossword.

  “Four across, five letters. The clue is ‘intelligent,’” I read. “Susan, that’s a bit narcissistic, don’t you think?”

  “Ah, yes.” She wrote the letters of her name in the boxes with a pencil. “I knew I was onto something there. Now state your purpose or leave me be. I’m actually being productive. You might try it some time.”

  “Clay’s sleeping off the night shift and there’s a rumor someone’s moving in on local high-schoolers with free samples of candy,” I said. “You heard anything like that?”

  “No.” Susan’s smile disappeared. “Jesus. Here? In Gloucester?”

  “Yeah, here,” I said. “Yarn-store central.”

  We told her about Winley, and I put the capsule I’d found in the kid’s bedroom on the dining-room table between us. Susan examined the pill, then took the paper with the phone number from me and turned the laptop away from Nick. As I’d hoped she would, she used whatever mysterious connection she still had with the Bureau to find the number.

  “Burner phone,” she said. “It’s untraceable. Registered to no one.”

  “Can we find out where it was purchased?” I asked, taking a seat beside her.

  “Bill, I’m not your federal connection,” Susan said. “I don’t work for the Bureau anymore. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, you’ll have to do it on your own.”

  “But you still seem in league with them somehow,” Nick said, gesturing to the laptop.

  “Just call up your old friends and get them to help us out,” I said.

  “I can’t call up my old friends and ask them for favors any more than you can,” she said, looking at me. I felt a chill run up the back of my neck. I wasn’t sure if Susan knew what I had done in Boston, what had gotten me severed like a gangrenous limb from the job I loved. Her comment suggested she knew something.

  “Look,” she said. “A drug dealer using burner phones and giving out free product is probably part of an outfit. Junkies don’t have the cash to keep buying devices—they use public phones, and they sure don’t give anything away for free. The guy on the end of this number? He’s probably just a soldier delivering the goods.”

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. “This could be a gang or something?”

  “What I’m saying is you need to decide whether you want to get involved,” Susan said. “You might end up with a whole pack of them on your tail. If you target the wrong guy, you could be in a world of trouble.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE APPOINTMENT WAS for one Mitchell Antoine Cline, but when Dr. Raymond Locke looked up from his desk, he saw three men entering his small office. From the information in his files, he figured that Cline was the smallest of them, a man with a well-toned body filling out his Hugo Boss shirt and long, narrow feet in patent-leather shoes. He sat in a chair while the two men with him—a thickly built Asian guy with an enormous silver watch and a much bigger black guy with a neat goatee—stood against the wall and looked bored. Locke noted that he hadn’t clicked the alert button on the computer screen to tell the front desk to send the next patient in.

  “Mr. Cline, is it?” Locke leaned back in his chair. “Uh, this is awkward, but I actually don’t take group appointments. I thought you were here to talk about your”—he looked at the computer screen again—“laryngitis. Could your friends perhaps wait outside?”

  “My health is fine.” Cline smiled. “I’m not here for a medical consultation. I’m here with a business proposal, Dr. Locke. I’m told you’re in charge of the pharmacy at this hospital

  “I … excuse me?”

  “You’re a multitalented guy, Doctor.” Cline clasped his long hands on his knee. “You juggle many responsibilities. Mondays you’re here at the hospital as an internist. Tuesdays to Thursdays, you put in time in the ER. On Fridays, you review the pharmacy inventory and order what’s needed, and Saturdays you play squash with two other doctors. Sundays you drive your teenage son, Adam, to acting classes. He dreams of Broadway. Very refreshing in a TV-driven world, you ask me.”

  The big black man in the corner of the room heard his cue, strode forward, and placed a Polaroid on the desk in front of Locke. It was a profile shot of Locke and Adam walking to the family car in the Fresh Stars parking lot. Locke eased air through his lips.

  “I think you’re ripe for more responsibility,” Cline said. “Our partnership could be very profitable for you.”

  “This is … ” Locke shook his head, tried to find the words. “This is … ”

  The big guy unfolded a piece of paper and put it next to the photograph of Locke and his son. Locke took it and looked at the items on this list. A part of his brain knew exactly what was happening and what would come next. He’d heard stories like this from friends he’d known in med school, although always second- and thirdhand and always unbelievable. Even as Cline continued speaking, part of Locke’s brain could almost say the words along with the stranger in the chair before him. Another part of his brain was experiencing pure panic. Deep, gut-wrenching, red, raw panic, a siren that wailed uselessly as he gripped the paper for dear life. Though he’d always feared this, he’d never made a plan. He tried to tuck himself deeper into his chair.

  “You’ll have the items on that list shipped here monthly,” Cline said. “I’ll assign you a liaison, one of my business associates, who will collect the items and adjust the order as necessary. You’ll be compensated for your assistance.”

  “I can’t—”

  “You’re afraid,” Cline said. His handsome features were warm, almost kind, and he nodded with compassion. “I understand. You’ve heard stories about this sort of thing. You think that if you’re late or light on a shipment or if you involve the police in our arrangement, my men will come around here with ice picks and baseball bats and teach you a lesson. That’s not true, Dr. Locke. Nothing’s going to happen to you. We will take our business elsewhere, and you’ll go back to your normal, happy life.”

  Locke felt his legs trembling beneath his desk. Cline took a moment to examine the certificates on Locke’s wall almost dreamily before he continued.

  “Then one day you’ll get a phone call,” Cline said. “It might be a couple of months from now, or a year. The caller will be from your son’s high school. He’ll be wondering where your son is, why you didn’t call to say that your son would be out sick. You’ll tell them you dropped him at the school gates. He should be there. You’ll call 911. There will be an Amber alert. A media appeal. A prayer vigil. People will put flowers and teddy bears and candles on the lawn outside your house.”

  “Listen. Some of this stuff, I … I can’t justify ordering it,” Locke stammered. “You … you’ve got embalming fluid on here. How do I explain that? We’re not a funeral parlor. Mescaline I can’t get unless I submit for special approval. The Duragesic, the morphine … it’s too much!”

/>   “It’ll take some time for police to find your son.” Cline brushed an invisible piece of lint from the shoulder of his shirt, talking softly, ignoring Locke. “They’ll have to access his dental records to confirm his identity. Your wife will want to see him. The medical examiner will advise against it.”

  “Okay.” Locke put his hands up. “Okay. Okay. Please stop. Just stop.”

  “I’ll leave Simbo and Russ here to sort out the details.” Cline smoothed the front of his shirt as he stood. “It was such a pleasure doing business with you.”

  Cline put out his hand. Locke shook it, but he was so numb, he hardly felt the icy contact against his skin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I LEFT SUSAN to her work at her laptop and went into the kitchen. Nick followed me. He was jittery, edgy. I’d seen him this way sometimes, bored and searching for conflict, his nerves shot from his time in Iraq and his brain always looking for danger. Just the whiff of trouble could send Nick into a fever. He was like a junkyard dog rehomed to a senior-care facility. Nothing to do. Nothing to guard against.

  He stood rubbing his hands together and looking to me as I poured myself a glass of water.

  “So what are we gonna do?” he asked.

  “Find the loser who gave Winley the junk and cram his head somewhere narrow and dark.”

  “But Susan said this could be a whole gang. A sophisticated outfit.”

  “Nothin’ gets past you.”

  “So we’ve gotta take ’em all out, man. We’ve got to put a stop to this.”

  “We,” I said, pointing to his chest and then mine, “don’t have to do anything. We can go knock some heads together to ease Mrs. Minnow’s mind. But we don’t want to get in too deep. If there’s a whole posse of these pricks, it’s Clay’s job to move them on.”

  “Clay?” Nick scoffed. “Clay couldn’t move a throw pillow from one end of a couch to the other without fucking it up somehow and injuring himself in the process.”