Westfarrow Island

by Paul A. Barra

  He watched his wife load rounds into her .38 Smith & Wesson revolver. She leaned forward, arms outstretched, concentration written on her face. She squeezed off rounds smoothly, not jerking the gun or moving her body. Her aim was accurate at five yards.

  “If you can hit something at this distance, you will be able to defend yourself.”

  Agnes Ann popped open the cylinder of her gun and let the empty brass fall into her other hand. She rested with one hip against the fender of their old car, looking long, slim, and competent. Sitting next to her on the tailgate was a new gun Tagliabue had purchased just for home protection, a deadly looking Remington twenty gauge that was just more than two feet long, with a pistol grip instead of a stock like a normal shotgun. This Model 870 TAC-14 was designed specifically to repel a home invasion. Agnes Ann pumped a round into the chamber like a mountain man. She leaned forward and fired the shotgun from her hip. It boomed—and shredded one of the paper targets into confetti.

  She smiled. “Now that’s more like it,” she said.

  That night they rested easy, each with a handgun in reach. The shotgun was cradled over the bedroom door. The dog circled her blanket a couple of times before settling in to guard their room.

  The wind blew after midnight, keeping Ethyl on alert but quiet. Hours passed. The wind fell off. When she detected movement not caused by the wind, she was no longer quiet.

  Tagliabue slipped out of bed and into his jeans. The black dog growled low in her throat. Agnes Ann’s eyes went wide.

  “What is it, Tony?” she whispered.

  “Something’s bothering her. Sit on the floor with your piece. I’ll let you know it’s me before I come back through the door.”

  So, she thought to herself, if someone comes in without announcing himself, I just shoot him. It was a frightening thought. She pulled on her robe and sat on the carpet at her side of the bed, the far side from the door. She cleared her throat and waited. The door clicked closed.

  Tagliabue and the dog went downstairs.

  They left through the sliding doors on the bay side of the house, the big schnauzer quiet now that the hunt was on. They stopped in a shadow. The two blended in immediately, the man in dark clothes and his black animal. The moon was a waning quarter, the sky cold and clear.

  They looked at the Hatteras floating on a steel sea. Tagliabue could detect no movement on the white boat and the water was perfectly calm. No ripples. No bubbles. He touched Ethyl’s head and started around the back of the house. When they slipped through the corral gate, they could hear the horses moving their feet. One snorted. It was late; they should have been asleep in the moist warmth of the barn. Something had disturbed them.

  Tagliabue got down and crawled forward on his elbows. The dog stalked beside him. The horses had tramped most of the snow in the corral to mud. It was frozen hard now and he could feel its furrows and ridges on his chest. They crossed the fenced area by moving a few feet, then stopping. They made the back door of the barn. It was closed. The outside latch was set. Tagliabue squinted through a crack between bottom boards. The burning night-light was small, the interior of the barn dim. His field of vision was narrow. He could see Hat Rack with his head over the half door of his stall. The gelding was quiet, but he raised and lowered his head as he peered out.

  The horse was looking at something Tagliabue couldn’t see. After his heart rate slowed, Tagliabue raised up an inch at a time, one hand on the dog’s head, thigh muscles straining. He slid the latch bar through its staple. Pulling on the heavy door, he tried to remember if it creaked as it opened. It didn’t. At least, not for the first ten inches, and that was all he needed. Peeking in, he still couldn’t see what the horse was curious about. He sent the dog in with an attack command. Ethyl bolted silently, a black streak through the center of the barn. She erupted into a snarl when she reached the other end. Someone screeched. Scuffling sounds rose in the building and horses started snorting and stamping their hooves. Tagliabue went in at a run.

  He found a man up on a mound of hay bales, pointing a handgun at the big dog lunging below him. Tagliabue bellowed and fired his 9 mm at the ceiling.

  “You shoot that dog, turkey, and you’re a dead man.”

  Horses whinnied in fear and bucked around their stalls. Their goat companions bleated in complement. Tagliabue flipped the main light switch, throwing into stark outline a vision of young Timmy O’Brien with his hands raised high, one holding a black syringe case. He was wild-eyed, open-mouthed. Ethyl barked. The barn was in an uproar.

  “I hope you can explain yourself, sonny boy.”

  This time Tagliabue kept his piece in his hand, pointing in the general direction of Timothy O’Brien. When he had caught him on Maven the summer before, he had relaxed his gun hand in the presence of a man he considered a friend. The younger man now pressed his back against the wall of an empty stall, his eyes never leaving Ethyl, who sat watching him, her backside flexing silently, her mouth tight and wet.

  “Plea—please, Anthony. Call off your dog.”

  “You don’t move, she won’t move.”

  “I ain’t gonna move. Not a damn inch, I swear. He’s making me nervous, like he’s ready to attack.”

  “Getting caught on someone else’s property with intent to harm valuable racehorses is what ought to make you nervous,” Tagliabue said.

  He had picked up the syringe case with his handkerchief when O’Brien dropped it. He could feel the syringe in the case. The other animals in the barn had quieted now that they recognized him, and now that his dog had settled into watching mode. The horses were looking out into the passageway but had stopped kicking the ground and whinnying. He pressed Agnes Ann’s number on his cell and told her: “Everything’s okay. Call the constable and tell him to get over here. We have an intruder in the barn.” He clicked off. O’Brien licked his lips.

  Tagliabue called Ethyl over. She sat next to him, watching the young man, her muscles hard as stone, vibrating. O’Brien sank slowly to his rear. His face was crumpled.

  “It’s all a fucking mess, Anthony. A real fucking mess.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I shouldn’t a done it. Shouldn’t a done it. I done bad things before. This is the worst. I’m really sorry.”

  O’Brien began to blubber. Ethyl whined. Tagliabue waited. He had always liked Timmy O’Brien, thought he did remarkably well after the disaster his father, Bronc, had turned into. Timmy was the only bartender he knew who didn’t drink. He had a pleasant wife and two young boys he doted on, spent time with them. Worked two jobs. What could make a man like him go off the rails and do something so dangerous and illegal as this? In a voice so weak Tagliabue could barely hear him, Timmy answered him.

  “I’m addicted to pain pills, Anthony. I can’t get by without ’em.”

  Tagliabue felt heat rise into his face. His muscles hardened, his pupils dilated. He clenched his teeth before he exploded.

  “Is that the best you can do, O’Brien? Whine about how you can’t live without eating some fucking chemical? You’ve got a family, children. You’re supposed to be a man, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to be responsible for them. You’re not supposed to be some Mary who can’t control his appetites!”

  His voice had risen, his body also. A roar of anger and profanity was something rarely heard from Big Anthony Tagliabue and O’Brien cowered under the assault, as if he expected Tagliabue to hammer him with his fists as well as his bellowing. He didn’t reply. His face was ashen and his mouth hung open. But Tagliabue’s fire died as quickly as it had risen in him. He sat back down, breathing hard. He had learned years ago not to release his bile. He had learned that he was so strong and fast that he could do serious damage if he lost his temper, so he trained himself to always control any rage that threatened to fill him. The training had worked, but he was so disappointed in this young man he considered a friend and a good person, so dismayed at Timmy’s failure to act responsibly, that his fury momentarily overcame his
training in the barn that cold night. Timmy O’Brien moaned. His pain sounded real. Tagliabue forced himself to speak quietly.

  “You get your pills from Jack Brunson?”

  O’Brien nodded, sniffling and crying.

  “You came on my boat last summer when she was tied up near the Pelham Island, doing something for Brunson?”

  He nodded again. “I . . . I was supposed to plant some pills, but you heard me.”

  Tagliabue exhaled. “Tell me your story and hurry up. Ian Fletcher is on his way.”

  O’Brien began to talk. He told Tagliabue how he got addicted and how Jack preyed on his addiction. He told him how he was supposed to medicate Francine on Brunson’s orders. It all came out in a rush.

  “I swear to God, Anthony, this is the end for me. Frances will help me get clean. She’s a good wife and she’ll help me. I’ll work this out. I’ll never do you wrong again, Anthony, I swear. Give me a break, man. Please give me a break! I’ll rat jack out if I even see him again.”

  Tagliabue raised his sidearm.

  “Get your sorry ass out of here, Timmy.”

  Tagliabue holstered his weapon. Timmy O’Brien scrambled to his feet and ran out of the barn. Ethyl whined again. She looked from her master to the fleeing felon, but she stayed seated next to him.

  “You did a good job, girl. Let’s go tell Aggie what transpired here tonight.”

  “You let him go, Tony?”

  “Yeah,” Tagliabue sighed. “He promised to get help. He promised to let me know if Jack contacts him again.”

  Agnes Ann was silent.

  “I know, Aggie. I’m a sap.”

  She turned to him as they stood outside in the cold waiting for the island constable. They both had on their lined jackets and wool hats. The air turned their breathing to ice clouds.

  “You’re not a sap, Tony. You’re a good man. Good men prove they’re good by their behavior. I think you behaved well just now.”

  He smiled and wrapped his left arm around her.

  “So Timmy snuck over here because he had to feed his habit. Jack sold drugs, you mean?”

  “Not directly, at least, not at first. The Magpie was the dealer who found out Timmy wanted pain pills after he recovered from a hospital visit for shingles. He probably had an aide or a nurse at Bath General who tipped him off. After Marv died, Jack took up supplying a few guys who could help him. Timmy said Jack wouldn’t take any money. He just wanted favors now and then.”

  He told her that Timmy O’Brien was supposed to inject “the red horse” with the sedative in the syringe, to slow her morning work so that Agnes Ann would consider selling her back to him. Brunson apparently didn’t know that the racing filly, Francine, was over on the mainland with his own son, Jesse, being trained and worked for her three-year-old season. O’Brien was trying to find a chestnut among the herd when his searching around made the horses nervous and alerted Ethyl. He didn’t think that a sedative would harm Agnes Ann’s horse. Two days later, she and Tagliabue found out that Jack Brunson had lied to his addicted helper. Neither of them was surprised.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “The needle was full of botulism,” Johnny Coleman said. “I’m sure glad Ian Fletcher didn’t open the case. He told me it was a poison, so I gave the whole deal to forensics. I didn’t touch nothing but the baggie it was in.”

  The sheriff’s detective was speaking on a video conference call with Tagliabue, Agnes Ann, and the DA’s Daniela Martin two days after the intruder had run from the main barn at Seaside Stables. Town Constable Ian Fletcher arrived at the horse farm just after three A.M. and took the plastic syringe case the intruder had dropped in his haste to vacate the premises—the constable’s words. Tagliabue still felt washed out from the incident. He had witnessed the perfidy of people he liked many times in his life, but finding Timmy engaged in an attempt to harm him and Agnes Ann left him with an empty feeling in his chest.

  “It’s too bad you didn’t grab the jerk with the needle, instead of just chasing him off,” Johnny Coleman said. “Constable Fletcher didn’t find no sign of the intruder except for blurred footprints in some snow and tire tracks. A car did pass him going the other way as he was coming to your property, but he didn’t recognize it. It didn’t stand out or nothing.”

  O’Brien had been wearing gloves, so his fingerprints were not found on the case Tagliabue had assumed was a gun at first. Partials matching those on file for John “Jack” Brunson had been lifted by Coleman’s lab tech. The syringe contained enough botulinum toxin to kill an animal the size of Francine, the detective told them, almost 460-nanograms. The bacteria were dissolved in a fluid and had apparently been stolen during a big compounding pharmacy heist down in Boston over the summer.

  “The stuff was part of a stock that the pharmacy was watering down for treating wrinkles in old ladies, like Botox. No offense, Daniela,” Coleman said with a laugh.

  Martin huffed and said, “Little old ladies aren’t the only ones with wrinkles, Detective. I heard Satch Conyers gets Botox to keep his head smooth for the ladies.”

  Everyone on the phone laughed, a short-lived break from the serious nature of their conversation. Tagliabue opined that a major robbery was well out of the expertise range of a bent lawyer like Jack Brunson.

  “I suspect he was given the poison by the Delgado organization.”

  “Why would a gangster want to kill my horse?”

  “Alphonso Delgado doesn’t give a damn about Francine, Aggie. Jack asked for the toxin to exact revenge on you. Delgado owns Jack and his twisted legal mind and favors rendered are how guys like that keep a tight hold on guys like Jack.”

  “How can Jack help him if he’s in hiding somewhere?”

  “Don’t know, but I would guess that he had the toxin for months, long before all his troubles with the law began. This was probably his last best chance to use it.”

  “What befuddles me is why anyone on Westfarrow would agree to kill a horse,” Martin said, not knowing that Timothy O’Brien was the intruder. “It’s not as if there are hardened gangsters on the island.”

  Coleman had an answer to that apparent conundrum.

  “Probly didn’t realize it was going to kill the horse. We know that the pills in Mrs. Tagliabue’s hay belonged to Brunson. He may have been using an island guy. The perp here might of needed the pills. Who knows?”

  “Our defendant was selling him drugs?” Martin asked.

  “Brunson probly got them from the Magpie. Marv Harris. A small-time crook who shot Anthony’s mate. Dead now, but him and Brunson were buds. Could be Brunson’s got a few other guys doing odd jobs for him lately and getting pills in return. Now he don’t have Harris anymore.”

  Martin murmured to herself as she digested that information, no doubt trying to calculate how she could rearraign Jack Brunson on drug dealing charges, Tagliabue thought. She asked Coleman if the police were looking for Brunson.

  “We’re looking okay, but we ain’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

  If Brunson had gone to ground as they suspected, Tagliabue said, his gangster friends must not be happy with him. “Otherwise, I don’t see why he ran off after asking for a plea deal. He made at least some kind of bargain offer with the judge. Jack’s not going to get anything better from the state, is he Ms. Martin?”

  “Not likely. So, you’re assuming Delgado didn’t like the plea bargain and told the defendant as much? He’s afraid Jack was going to implicate him in some nefarious activities.”

  “When Jack heard of your proposed plea deal from his lawyers and realized he was going to have to testify against the Delgado cartel, plus spend time in prison, he must have figured it wasn’t such a good deal for him after all.”

  “And,” Johnny Coleman said, “prison’s not a safe place for snitches. Brunson musta figured he’d be better off on the run than in the clink.”

  Tagliabue nodded. “It’s the only reason I can discern for Jack to go into hiding.”

  Agnes Ann mo
uthed “discern?” to him as they ended the phone call. He smiled at her playful mockery.

  Less than two months later they found out that Jack Brunson had not gone into hiding as Tagliabue thought he must have done.

  Toby Walsh was raking quahogs from his scarred and roughened clam boat off the Doubling Point lighthouse in a thin spring sun, working hard enough on a fertile bed to have removed his lined jacket. He was still wearing his Carhartt overalls and his forehead was shiny from his exertions. He worked the long handle to dig the tines of his rake into the bottom mud and scratched loose into the attached basket enough bivalves to have almost a bushel of legals in the bottom of his boat. It was a decent harvest for so early in the season. He was enjoying the labor, the feeling of being in rhythm with the sky and water as his muscles oiled themselves after a long winter’s rest. In a few more pulls he would have caught enough and would motor into port before the sun got too low in the west. The salt air still got icy after sunset.

  The tempo of his work was interrupted when the rake caught on a snag. He pulled to loosen it. Walsh’s muscles were hardened from his years of bay work, so he was surprised when a determined yank didn’t dislodge the obstruction. There wasn’t much debris on the bottom here and he hadn’t expected this problem. He pulled on the handle, drawing his beamy boat to the rake. He gripped the pole of his rake as if he were removing a fence post and pulled straight up, grunting in effort and dipping the gunwale. When the rake came suddenly loose, a rush of gas bubbles came with it. They smelt of rot when they broke on the surface. He extracted the rake hurriedly: in the catch basket were a few clams, a single oyster shell, a wriggling shiner—and a bone enshrouded in white cotton. Walsh swallowed a few times, threw a buoy over the side to mark the spot, and reached for his cell to dial harbor patrol.