Joey Warnecki - Eight Days

Joey Warnecki - Eight Days Page 4

by John Dahlborg

Chapter 4

  At four o'clock in the morning on Friday, the tide was dead low in Rock Harbor. The channel was well marked, but vessels not intimately familiar with the bottom-busters that gave the harbor its name were well advised to wait for high tide and daylight to navigate upon its waters. The barrier island that protected the harbor from the full brunt of Atlantic storms was only the largest of the spawn of granite that formed the harbor basin. The shoreline was littered with the debris of boats that had torn their hulls and broken up in shallow waters. Though loss of life was rare in these mishaps, even experienced fishermen found themselves in need of rescue, at times, by the police patrol. The embarrassment of grounding themselves, not to mention the financial loss incurred, was compounded by the fact that a photograph of their unfortunate accident would inevitably find its way to Molly's Wall of Infamy, where it would be seen and commented upon by all patrons of that establishment. Once enshrined there, the wrecking of both boat and reputation repeated endlessly in conversation and memory.

  Rock Harbor Patrol boat One was a twenty-four foot dream in mahogany and brass. Lovingly restored and maintained by the men of the R.H.P.D. marine unit, the seventy year old cruiser was the pride of the department. The school children of town were given tours of the harbor in it. Visiting yachtsmen admired it and offered grand sums of money to buy it for themselves. So it was with great caution that its crew of two negotiated the channel back to their slip on the municipal dock this dark, early morning after patrolling the area of the harbor park for the third time tonight.

  One officer directed a spotlight to sweep the narrow channel while the other manned the wheel, one hand ready to slow or reverse its twin diesel engines. The power of the one hundred and fifty h.p. engines was enough to push the vessel to over forty knots, but neither man aboard would consider that possibility here and now. They only wanted to thread the needle back to home and hot coffee. So intent were they on protecting their craft, that they almost missed seeing the spark of light that flared briefly near the lobster pound, three hundred yards away. It registered just enough in their minds to draw both their attentions to it in time to catch the flat sound of a small-caliber weapon that carried to them over the still water of the harbor. The officer at the wheel throttled down to idle and disengaged the screws. The other officer, swinging the powerful light to illuminate the far end of the harbor, thought he heard a splash. "Call it in. Shot fired, in pursuit." The helmsman spoke without taking his eyes from the dimly lit scene ahead. He could just make out a man in a small light-colored boat, stooped over in the stern, head turning to look back at him. The man moved quickly to the steering console amidships and powered up the large, black outboard at the stern. The small boat reached planing speed almost immediately and raced for the channel leading out of the northeast end of the harbor. The patrol boat accelerated more cautiously, trying to stay in the center of the channel. On open water they would have caught him, but once beyond the island, the smaller craft bore to port, leaving the channel and entering shoal water where the larger boat did not dare to go. Keeping safely in the channel, the officers watched a mad performance of rock and shoal dodging until the other boat was hidden from sight behind the several small islands that occupied the next three miles of coastal water. He never reappeared in view at the end of the chain.

  Cruising back homeward, the officers considered only two possible end results of such an insane flight. Either the boat's pilot found his way into any one of several tidal creeks that crawled like snakes through the mudflats to meet the broken shoreline, or he tore his hull open and met his end in the cold, cold water. Of the two, they thought the latter more likely. They stopped for a few minutes by the lobster pound to shine the light around the area, but all was still and quiet. The fishermen wouldn't be on the water until the tide rose somewhat, so the patrol boat was the only thing happening on the harbor. When they were tied up to the dock again, nothing was moving on the water.

  .

  Around the same time the patrol boat was tying up, Joey woke up hungry. His fever had broken and the bedding twisted about him was clammy with his fevered sweat. He thought for a while about what to do, but hunger caused him to untangle himself from the bedding and get up. He wrapped the quilt around himself and padded downstairs in the moonlight that found its way through the windows of the house. He went directly to the kitchen and opened cupboards, searching for foodstuffs, the old linoleum of the kitchen floor cold under his feet. He found a plastic-wrapped tube of crackers and tucked it under an arm. Opening the refrigerator, the glare of its bulb almost blinded him, since there was little inside to diffuse its light. There was a half bottle of screw-top red wine on a shelf, an open box of baking powder, and an almost full package of individually wrapped slices of american cheese. He took the wine and cheese. Standing at the pine table, he unwrapped, chewed and sipped, unwrapped, chewed and sipped, until he was left with a pile of plastic sheets and an empty green bottle. "A lovely meal," he said, aloud, "wine and cheese and bread, almost." The wine made him feel giddy. "Now to do the laundry."

  Fifteen minutes later, his clothing, the towels he had used, and the bedsheets were all swirling together in the washing machine in the laundry room that backed the kitchen. In another half-hour, his athletic shoes joined the mix to bump around in the dryer. Forty minutes later on, he was dressed and making up the bed he had slept in.

  Light returned to the world and the early morning sun reflected off the glazed crust of the snow frozen in drifted waves outside. Joey wrote a note of explanation and apology to Meredith Adams, promising to more than make up for the damage of his intrusion into her home and begging her pardon. He signed it and left it on the marble-topped hall table where she would be sure to see it, her next time here.

  Although his hands still felt like claws from the damage done to them by the cold and the cuts, overall he felt much improved. He was fastening the last button of his denim jacket and preparing himself mentally to face the cold whiteness of the world outside when he heard the sound of a truck rumbling up the access road to the house. He looked through a window of the door sidelight and saw a man get out of a primer-gray pickup truck and unhook the chain that blocked entrance to the driveway up to the house, wrapping it around its post. A rusted plow on the front end of the truck angled crazily. Joey wondered how the driver managed to travel the roads without catching the lower end of the plow on potholes and curbs. Then Joey recognized the driver. It was Benny Tankowitz, Benny the Tank to his friends, of whom Joey was one. Benny's substantial gut was visible, hanging below the hem of a red plaid shirt. Benny's dog, a large black animal of uncertain breed, rode shotgun in the passenger seat.

  Benny counted on income from winter plowing to get him through the season and keep him supplied in the fuel that kept him going, namely peach-flavored brandy. Summer, spring and fall, the work was mowing and raking lawns and he stoked his engine with beer. He lived alone, except for the dog, and spent most of his off-time in Molly's Bar, enjoying the fruits of his labor.

  Joey watched from inside until Benny had finished scraping the gravel driveway free of snow and then stepped outside, waving to attract his attention. The dog noticed him first, letting out with a woof through the open passenger side window. Benny stopped the truck, squinting to recognize the figure stepping through the snow left before the granite steps.

  "Joey!" he shouted, "What the hell are you doing here?" Benny was a big man with a voice to match. His bearded face appeared in the passenger window alongside the dog's. Together, they filled the frame. Joey thought again that he resembled Santa Claus, with his white mane and reddened, bulbous nose.

  "Hey, Benny," Joey answered, "I kind of got stuck here during the storm. Can I get a ride with you down the hill?" Joey put his hands on the door frame, leaning away to keep away from the dog's licking tongue.

  "Sure, Joey. Say, you don't look too good. What happened to your hands?"

  Joey pulled his hands away and looked at them. "They got a little f
rostbit, I guess, and then I got cut breaking into the house." He pointed to the brown towel, half hanging out of the busted sidelight.

  Benny followed Joey's pointing finger and then regarded him again. "Old lady Adams ain't gonna be too happy with that, Joey. Don't think I'd want to be in your shoes when she sees that." He changed subjects. "You been in the news a lot. You in trouble?"

  Joey looked at his feet. "Yeah, some. Don't know how much, yet. I'm going to try to get it cleared up." He looked back up. "People talking much?"

  Benny chuckled. "Oh jeez, yeah. You're the main topic around town. Get in, I'll tell you all about it on the way down.

  Joey squeezed into the over-burdened cab and Benny picked up the plow blade, backed and turned, and drove away the way he'd come. The rust that was in the process of claiming the plow had already eaten away most of the truck's muffler, and the roar of the engine made conversation difficult. They yelled back and forth, Joey telling much of his version of the story to an amazed Benny, and Benny relaying what he'd heard from the news and the various wild speculations of the denizens of Molly's bar. Good stories were valuable currency at Molly's and Benny would be the richest man there this afternoon, with first-person knowledge to barter. It was worth increased status and a good many free drinks.

  Overhanging branches of hemlock and pine along the roadway, laden with the heavy ice and snow, released their load onto the truck when it scraped beneath then. Some of the snow found its way into the overheated cab and melted on its occupants. "You know," Benny said, "Old lady Adams and her whole crew were supposed to be up there, day before Thanksgiving, set up for the holiday." He laughed. "Can you imagine her finding you in her bed? She would have had a stroke right there." The picture made him laugh again.

  Joey's amusement was somewhat less. "I imagine it would have been a scene, alright. I'm not too popular with the family right now. Hope I can make it up, somehow."

  They were approaching the entrance to the park. Concrete-capped fieldstone pillars stood on either side and a rustic wooden sign announcing the park's name hung between a pair of wooden posts. Benny idled at the stop sign to reattach the chain between the pillars. "Where do you want to get left off, Joey? You gonna go to the police now?"

  Joey had been relieved to hear from Benny that he wasn't wanted for the drug charge, but wasn't yet ready to take that step. "Drop me off at my house first, would you? I want to change and shower, and stuff."

  .

  Except for a few extra cars in the parking lot behind the building, the gray concrete exterior of the Rock Harbor P.D. was peaceful. The sun was bright and the United States and Maine flags hung limply atop their iron poles in the still air. Inside the building, the atmosphere was other than tranquil.

  The chief was berating Sims for obtaining neither the warrant nor the suspect. He had previously chewed out Mary Hartz for not getting the out-of-state information and for not getting a court order to hold the Wojciehowski bank accounts. The fact that the day before had been a holiday was not alluded to. Without offering a word in her own defense, she had gone to her desk to do her work. Also on the receiving end of Sloan's ire had been Sergeant Clarkson, for the crime of breaking his habit of silence with the media. Clarkson was another that did not offer words of excuse.

  Sergeant Lebeau waited outside the ring of Sloan's abuse for a chance to break in and orally report the incident of a few hours earlier. Two men in conservative dark suits watched from behind Lebeau, awaiting their turn to speak. And two other men stood apart from it all, leaning against opposite walls of the desk-filled bullpen. One was Brulick, trying to be invisible and darting his eyes from person to person in the room. The other was Knowles, wearing mirrored aviator's sunglasses and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup, appearing unconcerned of any fuss. Half of the dozen or so gray metal desks in the room were filled with uniformed officers and clerical staff, pretending to be occupied with paperwork or phone calls, but actually eavesdropping to gauge the direction of the blowing wind.

  The chief appeared to have finished with his present diatribe, so LeBeau dove in. "Chief," he said, "Got to tell you something. You'll want to hear it firsthand."

  Sloan darted his eyes to him. "What is it?" he snapped, and noticed the men in suits. "Who are you guys?"

  The two men appeared to be cast from the same mold and dressed by the same tailor. Both tall, fit, neatly attired from their recently trimmed brown hair to their shined wingtips, the only significant difference between them was that one had designer-frame glasses and brown eyes while the other wore no glasses and had blue eyes. Glasses stepped in front of LeBeau and held open a leather badge case, letting Sloan read the laminated picture i.d. next to the silver badge. "James Donovan, DEA out of Boston. And my partner, Roy Stennis." He indicated the other man who nodded, but remained silent, hands at his sides. "Like to talk with you, privately, about the cocaine you discovered."

  Sloan studied the i.d. for a moment longer than necessary before replying. "Let's go in my office." He turned to LeBeau and said, "Wait here for me," before leading the DEA men to his office. Conversation in the bullpen increased after the door to his office closed.

  Sims turned to Sergeant LeBeau. "I talked to Tommy when he came in. What do you make of it?" Tom Blakely was the boat helmsman during the early morning chase.

  LeBeau shook his head. "That little boat flew like a bat out of hell. If he didn't crack up on the rocks, it would have been a miracle that saved him."

  "So the guy knew his way around, assuming he survived."

  "The next crew out took the sixteen-footer and went out at daybreak to check it out. They're not back yet, but haven't reported seeing any wreckage. Yeah, I'd say it was a local guy. Someone who's spent his life on the water around here. Someone who learned the rocks as a kid, you know? Still, I grew up in a boat here, too, and I'd never pull that shit at night. Not even with the moon we had last night."

  "And they really heard a shot." Sims was looking for further confirmation of the story, not attempting to cast doubt on it.

  "Oh, yeah. It was real quiet on the water last night. No wind, no surf, no traffic. They saw the flash and heard the shot a second later. They're sure it was a gunshot. When they went back, you know, there wasn't nothing. Not a ripple. I gotta ask the chief does he want a diver out there, see if there's anybody down there. Water's only about six feet there by the pound at low tide, but that water's cold."

  "Water's not too clear, huh?"

  "Well, you know, only a few boats went out this morning, but it was enough to stir up the mud. I'm gonna try to keep the traffic down and have the crew scope the bottom when the tide goes out again." The men would use a glass-bottomed tube to pierce the surface reflection of the water and view what lay below. "I got four guys out checking the mudflats, too, looking to see if anybody ditched a boat there."

  "What kind of boat, do you know?"

  "Tommy said it looked like a Whaler, about sixteen feet, with a big Merc to push it." Not a custom boat, common enough in the area, but distinct enough to narrow the field down considerably.

  Two gun incidents in the same week in Rock Harbor was unusual in the extreme. Fistfights were common on a drunken Saturday night, but other kinds of violence were rare. Not a single officer in the department, saving the lieutenant, had ever had to draw his weapon in the line of duty, and Water's sole experience of it had been far distant from this little town. Both Sims and Lebeau were uncomfortable with the prospect of increased violence in Rock Harbor, but both had checked their sidearms carefully this morning.

  "Well," Sims excused himself, "I've got to see about a warrant. Check you later." He retired to his desk to call Henry Daniels, at the county courthouse.

  .

  Joey had to slam the truck door twice to get it to latch, because a piece of loose weatherstripping prevented it from closing properly. Joe Soucup's face appeared in a front window of his house and Joey waved to it. The face stayed in the window and no hand showed to wave back.
<
br />   "Guy's kinda creepy, ain't he?" Benny observed, seeing the unsmiling apparition floating in the window frame.

  "Joe's a coot, but he's okay. Just pissed that I didn't get his walk shoveled for him, probably. Thanks, Benny, buy you a beer when I get a chance."

  "No prob, Joey. Hope you get to do it before they lock your ass away." He drove away then, after his inconsiderate comment, and Joey made slight tracks along the shoveled driveway to his back door. He looked to the windows of Louis' house in passing, but saw no signs of life.

  He opened the left side swinging door to his garage enough to reach in and above to retrieve the spare key kept on the ledge above the door. He used it to unlock his back door and pushed the door in, away from the yellow tape that covered it without breaking the tape. Inside, he began to put his house and himself in order, showering and changing, vacuuming and straightening. "Enough is enough," he said to himself, "If I'm going to jail, at least my house will be clean."

  .

  Sims was put on hold for five minutes before reaching Daniels at the county courthouse. "Good morning, Officer Sims. Are you calling about that warrant?"

  "Yes, I am, Henry. Is it a good morning?" Sims thought that Daniels sounded a bit too chipper this morning. It was his 'I'm fine, but you're screwed' voice. The one he used when a defense attorney had no choice but to admit defeat in the face of overwhelming evidence.

  "Well, concerning that matter, I happen to be in the judge's office at this moment and he has a few words to say to you on the matter. Here he is." Sims heard the sound of the phone being passed and then the stentorian tones of the Honorable Samuel J. Biederman.

  "Sims? What the hell are you trying to do to me here? Don't you know I'm up for appointment next year?" The judge was pissed.

  "Sir?"

  "Sir? You get me to sign off on a blanket search warrant on the basis of drugs being found in plain sight in the home of the victim of a shooting, and then I see on the news, the television news, that the basis for the warrant, the warrant that I issued, is not only questionable, but totally unsubstantiated." Biederman's voice increased in volume until he was nearly shouting. Now his voice became softer, but more menacing. "Now, how do you think this is going to reflect on me, should this come up in a trial? Do you think that anything you found on this warrant is going to be admissible?"

  Sims considered whether he should accept the heat for this mess. Or if he'd take the heat even if he tried to pass it along to where it belonged. "Sir, I am calling on the express instruction of Chief Sloan. And if you recall, sir, the search warrant was picked up by Officer Brulick. If I may, sir, I'll give you my personal assessment of the matter at hand, and one way to go about it."

  The line went silent, while Biederman considered his options. A uniformed officer was a preferred scapegoat over the politically astute and vengeful Sloan. The chief and he went way back and if there were a way to resolve the issue without a confrontation with him, the judge was willing to hear it. He was still pissed about being put in a dubious legal position, but he could get Sloan to pay him back in some other way. "Let's hear it," he said shortly.

  "Sir, I believe this guy was ready to come in on his own, before the threat of a heavy drug charge made him bolt. When he learns that we don't want him on that, I think he's going to come in on his own. We may not need a warrant, and if he's reasonable, I think we can work something out. The problem is, that all the extraneous issues have sidetracked us from the central matter, namely the shootings. I want the chance to get him in here without him rushing to lawyer up and shut up. We had another shooting incident early this morning and I need to find out if the two things are connected." Sims heard muffled voices as a hand covered the phone mouthpiece and the two in the judge's office discussed the situation.

  "Alright, Sims, it's your call on this." Putting the blame for any failure on Sims. "No more bullshit, you hear?" And letting the previous matter sit with Sims, too. Biederman hung up without saying goodbye. Sims was low man on this particular political totem pole, and not being any kind of political animal, he would accept it if it meant resolving this case.

  .

  Joey checked the contents of his wallet. It still held the twenty-three dollars that was there two days before, minus the one he had given to Jenks, and he was thinking about breakfast at Emily's. He wondered if he dared to stop there before going to the police. And he was uneasy about what Doris' and Emily's attitude toward him might be.

  He had showered and changed and cleaned the blood out of the braided rug as best he could without taking it up and dragging it out to a professional cleaner. That would be a priority when he had finally cleaned up the other messes in his present life. He was deciding what to do next when he heard a car stop in front of the house. He got to the front room in time to see the cop from the other day, Knowles, and two men in suits climb out of a patrol car. Knowles had parked close enough to the pile of snow along the curb that the suited men had to bang their doors into the snow bank to get them open wide enough to exit the car. All three were wearing sunglasses against the strong glare.

  Joey panicked. Although he was almost determined to turn himself in and put himself in the hands of the law, those hands still felt like grasping claws to him, and his heart pounded. He wasn't ready for this. He ran into the hallway by the bathroom and jumped, knocking the hatch to the attic up and to the side. He jumped again and grasped the joists to either side of the opening, pulling himself up and into the attic space. Without the adrenaline of his panic, he would have struggled to hoist himself up, but as it was, he went up in one smooth motion, like a gymnast on the parallel bars. He perched there, with his bottom on one joist and his feet on the other and set the hatch back into place between his legs, waiting for the men to enter his home. His breathing sounded loud to him and he tried to slow it down, but his body needed the extra air and wouldn't cooperate. Instead, he concentrated on taking long, slow breaths.

  Below him, he heard them enter and check the house, their footsteps cautious, only the occasional creak of a floorboard to betray their movement. Satisfied that the house was unoccupied, they began to talk. Their voices came faintly but clearly to Joey as he perched above them and his breathing and heartbeat returned to normal.

  Knowles spoke from the hallway directly below him, apparently speaking through the doorway to the men in suits in the sitting room. "Someone's been in here, cleaned the place up."

  "Maybe the guy came back, huh?" A second voice, clear, without the gravel of Knowles'. "Smells like pine cleaner in here. Rug's damp on this stain here. This is where he bled on the floor, right?"

  "I'm gonna check the basement, see if he's still here." Knowles voice. "Then I'm gonna ask the guy next door if he's been doing some cleaning in here."

  A third voice. "I'll back you up."

  Knowles again. "Alright, but don't shoot the guy if he's down there. No reason to consider him dangerous at this point."

  Joey heard footsteps moving through the kitchen and someone moving things around in the sitting room. He hoped that they wouldn't think to check the attic, but if they did, well, then that was it.

  Without voices to concentrate on, Joey's mind began to wander. He rarely visited this space and didn't use it for storage. Yellow fiberglass insulation filled the bays between the joists to their tops, and a single line of boards stretched the length of the attic from gable to gable, for access. Joey remembered helping his uncle install the itchy batts when he was a preteen. Just behind where he was presently poised, he had slipped and fallen, and one leg had gone through the sheetrock ceiling of the kitchen, up to his hip. His aunt had screamed at the sudden appearance of a limb protruding into her kitchen from above. He hadn't gotten hurt, except for a few scratches on his shins and a sore groin where he had caught the joist. Joey smiled now at the memory of his aunt's surprise.

  Let's see, he thought, I busted through right about ... here, and he leaned back slightly to feel under the fiberglass to find the patch with wh
ich his uncle had filled the hole. A rustle of papers met his searching fingers and he drew forth a sheaf of colored sheets of paper. He held them so the light from the louvered gable vent could catch them and tried to make out the writing on them. The light was weak, but he could make out the names of trucking companies on the sheet headings. They appeared to be receipts of some kind. He could make out some of the listings: "Ten drums, 55 gal., oil-contaminated polychlorinated biphenyl; fifteen drums, 55 gal., dichloro-diphenyl-something, something." He would need better light to make out much more. Signatures were scrawled and unreadable, as were dates and much of the rest. Joey folded the papers into fourths as quietly as he could and stuffed them into his shirt pocket for later perusal. He thought it a strange place to keep papers of any kind and wondered why his uncle, it must have been his uncle, had put them there.

  Downstairs the voices had returned and moved into the bedroom, where the sound was too muffled to understand more than the occasional word or phrase. Joey strained to hear. Ten minutes later they were directly below him.

  "I guess we're done here. Take us back to the station and we can interview the other investigating officers, okay?"

  "Sure," Knowles replied, "Go on out to the car and I'll close the place up. Just be a minute."

  Joey heard steps to the rear door and heavy feet, must be Knowles, move into the sitting room. Then he heard what might have been books being moved in the bookcases. This went on for a half-minute and the footsteps moved to the rear of the house, the door opened and closed, and the lock snapped.

  Joey waited five minutes to be sure no one was going to return before dropping down to the floor below. Standing on tiptoe, he could just get the hatch to seat itself over the hole. His home seemed to be undisturbed by the presence of the three interlopers, except for some damp footprints. He wondered what Knowles had been doing in the sitting room. Everything there appeared as it should be. Shrugging his shoulders in dismissal, he went to the closet in the bedroom for a warmer coat and a pair of boots high enough to keep his feet dry in the snow. He took a blanket-lined, tan canvas coat and a pair of leather work boots with tracked soles.

  Closing the back door behind him, he noted that Knowles hadn't bothered to replace the yellow plastic tape, which hung down at the side of the door. Louis was standing at his own rear door, holding several white plastic grocery bags by their loops. They noticed each other at the same time. Joey grinned and waved and Louis dropped his key ring into the snow by his steps.

  "Joey, damn," Louis uttered, then more loudly, "Where you been, boy? Get on over here and talk to me." A path had been shoveled over the grass strip between the two houses and Joey walked it.

  "Hey, Louis," Joey said, "How was your Thanksgiving? Make a turkey?"

  "Get my keys for me, unlock the door," he ordered and then, under his breath, "Boy disappears two days, then shows up looking for leftovers." He pushed the door open past Joey and carried in the bags. "Leave your boots by the door."

  Louis put the bags on the kitchen counter. "I'm gonna put this stuff away and you're gonna tell me where you been."

  Joey sat at the table and told the story in the time it took for Louis to stow everything away. Louis slumped in a chair opposite him and noticed Joey's hands for the first time. "Your hands don't look too good. You ought to get a doctor to look at them."

  Joey picked them up from where they lay on the table and examined them. "They're better than they were. The swelling's gone down and the cut's scabbed over pretty good. I think it's like a bad sunburn, or something. I'll be all right."

  Louis shook his head and scratched at the gray stubble on his jaw. "I worry about you, boy. Every time you get nervous, you think you can just walk away. You got to face up to things now. You know, they aren't after you for the drugs now, just the other stuff."

  "Yeah. Well, the 'other' stuff is enough. But, I'm turning myself in today, for sure." Joey spoke like a true believer.

  "You can call from here. Right now." Testing his commitment.

  "I think I'll show up down there. Might look better, going in on my own." Joey's voice said that his conversion was complete, but his eyes floated around the room.

  "Hmm. You know, you're going to need a lawyer. Sooner the better." The probability of martyrdom considered.

  "I think I'll wait on that, see how things go." Willing to put his faith to the test. It was time to change the subject. "So, did you cook a turkey? Doesn't smell like Thanksgiving in here."

  "Doesn't feel like it, neither. No, I didn't cook any turkey. It's still sitting in the refrigerator. I haven't felt like cooking much. Sure ain't gonna make a big turkey to eat by myself. So there's no leftovers. All there is handy is peanut butter and jelly, or maybe cheese and crackers. You want cheese and crackers?" It didn't sound as though Louis was willing to jump up and cook for Joey.

  "Ah, no thanks." Joey was remembering his last meal. "I might go on down to Emily's and have a big breakfast."

  "Yeah? You mean before you go on down to the police station? Like a last meal for a condemned man?"

  "Hey, no need for sarcasm. I said I'd go and I will," Joey said, defensively.

  Louis gave it up. Joey would follow through on it, or not. "Yeah, okay. You want a ride?"

  "No, thanks. It's not too far to walk. I've been laid out for too long, anyway. Need to stretch my legs out." He stuck his legs out under the table and stretched his arms above to demonstrate. The papers crinkled in his shirt pocket, reminding him of their presence. "Hey, take a look at these. Tell me what you think they are." Joey drew them from his pocket, handed them over to Louis, and explained the odd circumstance of their location.

  Louis examined them, taking his time. "Looks like about a hundred barrels of chemicals, maybe waste. Two trucking companies. All delivered to AdCanCo in the late 'seventies." His brow furrowed. "Seems like strange stuff for a cannery. What use would a fish cannery have for this kind of stuff?" He shook his head. "Beats the hell out of me. What do you think?"

  "I have no idea. You think it's something I should hang on to? If Uncle Stan put it, hid it, away in the attic like that, maybe it's important in some way."

  "I don't know. Wouldn't hurt to keep it. Like to know what this stuff is, anyway." Louis flattened the creases in the papers and stacked them in the center of the table.

  "Could you hold on to them for me?" Joey asked. "I don't want to bring them with me when I go to the police."

  "Yeah, I don't mind. Might take a ride to the library, later. See if I can find out what this stuff is." He paused. "You know, it's strange, the shit that comes back to haunt you."

  "It's beginning to seem that everything comes back, sooner or later. Sure feels like it now, I can tell you." Joey's appetite was getting stronger, and it took over his interest, pushing aside consideration of the machinations of fate. "I'm going to head out now. I'll call you when I find out what kind of trouble I have."

  "You do that. In fact, you need bail money or a lawyer, call me first."

  .

  By mid-morning, the streets of Rock Harbor were full of slush, and water ran into storm drains and then to the sea. The sun was strong, and everywhere, snowmelt dripped from eaves unto the necks of passersby on the sidewalks of town. The cold cringe of this frigid assault upon pedestrians was flanked by attacks from the side, as car and truck tires splashed through the ice water mix banked up along every curb.

  Joey hunched his collar tightly to his neck and walked closely to the buildings that lined Main Street on his walk through town to Emily's Rest. He'd taken a few hits of cold water and his pants were wet from knees to boot tops. Even so, walking on the sunny side of the street was pleasant. There was no breeze to speak of and the snow that remained was still clean enough to be attractive. By the end of the day, it would be gray and grimy. By nightfall, it would freeze into an unyielding, iron-like mass. By the following morning, that which hadn't been shoveled away would have to be chopped and chipped.

  Joey considered going b
ack and clearing Joe Soucup's walk. He'd done it for as long as he could remember, Old Joe paying him the same dollar-an-hour he'd given Joey as a boy of ten. Well, maybe he'd be able to do it later, he thought.

  He turned right onto Green Street and crossed in the middle of the block to the front door of Emily's Rest, avoiding some broken glass that a passing plow truck had thrown up onto the sidewalk. He picked up a few of these, dropping them over the banked snow into the slushy gutter. He looked through the glass in the door to see a dozen people eating, talking, and reading the newspaper. Then he went inside the restaurant.

  The heavenly aroma of Emily's Rest almost picked him up off of his feet. Coffee and hot, buttered toast. Cheesy omelets, sweet onions, and spicy home fries. So transported was he, that he barely noticed that every head turned at his appearance. Even the unperturbable Martha peered out at him through the service window of the kitchen. Conversation ceased, but he floated by everyone to sit at his usual stool, next to the cash register.

  He gazed upward at the chalkboard over the service window, reading today's specials. Emily came behind the counter to stand before him. Emily's hairstyle and dress today evoked the look of a 'thirties film star. His eyes drifted down to her and he smiled. "Hey, Em," he said, "Boy, am I hungry. How you doing?"

  Emily looked at him curiously. "I'm fine, Joey. Got to tell you though, you don't look any better than the last time I saw you. What happened to your hands?"

  "Little frostbite, I think. And I cut myself. But I'm fine, actually, or will be, once I have some blueberry 'cakes, coupla' scrambled eggs, home-fries, ah, bacon, and coffee." First things first. His eyes had gone back to the chalkboard. "What's a salsa omelet?"

  "Joey. Earth to Joey. Hey." He focused on her again with a sigh. "Joey, you've been on the news every night. No one's seen you. You've been the main topic of conversation in here. And you show up here out of the blue and order breakfast like nothing's happened."

  Joey came back to the present unwillingly. He blinked and surveyed the room. Doris and Martha watched him from the kitchen. The other diners had curiosity written on their faces. He made a small wave to the room at large and turned back to Emily. "Yeah, I guess. Things have been happening. I'm trying to get a handle on it." Emily wasn't satisfied with the short version. She remained unmoving. "Tell you what," he continued, "I'll make a deal with you." Seriously. "After I get some food in me, I'll tell you the whole story, okay?"

  Emily looked over her shoulder at Doris, who shrugged. Emily nodded in acquiescence. "Deal," she said. The other patrons went back to their plates and papers. It was clear they would get the story second hand, if at all, and their food was getting cold. First things first.

  .

  The worn linoleum tile before the front desk was puddled with melted slush and sand, dragged in by the feet of people who didn't fell the need to wipe their feet on the mat. Apparently, the sentiment was universal. The maintenance man had mopped the area twice already this day and his efforts were in vain. Still, he waited at the ready to do it again, by order of the chief, lest someone slip and sue the police department for negligence. Sisyphus with a mop, until a hard freeze, or spring.

  Sims felt like he was going around and around, too. He'd been on the phone for much of the morning, getting nowhere. He'd called both Dick Wiltse and Jim Laird and neither of them knew of any committee meeting at the Lion's Club. Charles Adams was still unavailable. Nothing had come in regarding Warnecki's location and Sloan had inquired about it several times already. The DEA men had gone over his investigation three times, asking the same questions repeatedly, as though they might catch him in a contradiction of his own report. The day dispatcher, a white-haired ex-WAVE, way past retirement age, but still with a perverse sense of humor, had even shunted a telemarketer's call to him. And Knowles had returned to tell him that someone, perhaps Warnecki, had been in the house. There was no answer at Louis Armstrong's home.

  He had just put the phone down again when it rang. It was Meredith Adams, transferred to his line from the front desk. She was irate about Joey's visit.

  "He broke a window, slept in a bed, took a bath, and drank a bottle of wine. After all the work I've given him, he breaks into my house and sleeps there! I want him arrested. I want him put in jail, the ingrate." She was breathless with indignation.

  "You say he left a note?" Sims rubbed his temple with his free hand. He was getting a headache. Must be the flu that was going around.

  "Yes, can you imagine! He had the nerve to think that an apology would be enough to undo the damage he'd done. I feel like I've been violated. My holiday has been absolutely ruined."

  "And you had been planning to spend Thanksgiving on the hill, but the storm kept you away." Talk her to death.

  "Yes. Instead, we had to have dinner at Charles'. I was most put out. Thanksgiving dinner on the hill is a tradition. And it was absolutely ruined. Ruined, I say."

  Did he dare interject reason into the conversation? "Well, Mrs. Adams, if the holiday was spoiled, you'd have to say it was the storm that did it, wouldn't you?" He suspected that not being in control of the feast, on her own territory, was the causal issue.

  She chose to ignore his rationale. "And that horrid little man, intruding upon our family celebration as he did. That never would have happened on the hill. He wouldn't have dared to show himself there. That awful, awful, wrinkled, man."

  Now Sims was confused. Who was she talking about? Warnecki? Wrinkled? "Excuse me, are you talking about Joseph Warnecki?" Sims pinched the bridge of his nose, pulling his eyelids shut tightly. His headache was getting worse. Didn't he have some Tylenol in the desk somewhere?

  "Of course not, you fool. I'm talking about Harry Sloan, of course." Even more indignant.

  Sims stretched his eyelids wide. Now where was she going? Then it came to him. Harry A Sloan had wooed Meredith Adams as a young man, he a youth of twenty-one or so, she already on her way to spinsterhood at the age of thirty-three. He pursued, she fled, a woman of her station not about to accept the attentions of the son of a fisherman. When the family fortune began to diminish, and father Matthew Adams, feeling the imminence of death, began to give the remnants of his fortune away in the hope that his name might ever be preserved, Sloan gave up the quest just as the fair maiden was about to give in. The town tittered and Meredith lost face. She eventually married a widower with two children of his own and Harry A. Sloan wed the daughter of a Boston retail merchant. Her enmity survived to this day, apparently.

  That Sloan and Adams, two big fish in a small harbor, should have business together, or social congress, was not to be thought unusual, and Sims really did not want to explore this occurrence. "What time did you arrive at the hill house? he asked.

  Meredith wasn't ready to dismiss the subject. "He showed up in the evening, just as we were about to have evening dinner, just a reprise of the principal repast, you know, and literally dragged Charles away on some business excuse or other. It was so unmannered, so rude, so ..." Meredith ran out of words.

  "Yes, I see. You must have been upset, but what time was it that you arrived at the hill house, this morning?"

  "And they never came back, just never came back. We waited and waited, everything drying up at the table, until Letitia, bless her soul, finally suggested that we should go on and wait no longer. I don't know how she can put up with such behavior. To plan and prepare on such short notice as she had, and to do such a perfect job, considering the press of time, and —"

  "Yes, it must have been difficult. You were saying, Mrs. Adams, you arrived at your place on the hill‐"

  "Eventually, it got so late that we just had to go to bed. I slept horribly and was awakened at five in the morning by Charles creeping in, probably from out drinking all night with that horrible man, I don't know why he would spend any time at all with such a person —"

  "Mrs. Adams‐"

  "Excuse me, I am speaking. And if you must address me as Mrs., then it's Mrs. Rutledge. You may call me Ms A
dams, or Mrs. Rutledge, one or the other."

  Sims took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. It seemed to help. "Ms Adams, can you, no, will you tell me: At what time did you arrive at your house and discover that someone had been there?" He had observed the form to the best of his ability.

  "Not someone. Joseph Warnecki," she corrected. "At about ten this morning."

  Two hours ago. "Thank you, Ms Adams. Will you save the note for me, please?"

  "Most assuredly."

  "I'll need you to come by and file a formal complaint." One more charge to add to the list.

  .

  Joey's outlook on life was much improved on a full stomach. He felt ready now to turn himself in to the police and bear whatever consequences awaited him. But first, he had made a promise to Emily to tell his story. He drained the last sip from his coffee cup and said to her, "Okay, Em, I'm ready to tell all. Great breakfast."

  Two diners remained in the restaurant. Emily conferred with Doris and they decided to leave the rest of the day's business to Martha. The day after Thanksgiving was usually light for business, anyway. "C'mon Joey, let's talk upstairs," Emily said. Doris met them in the stairwell and the three of them went up to the apartment.

  They seated themselves around the kitchen table and Joey told his story, from the death of Wojie to his stay on Frenchman's Hill. Doris did not interrupt him at all, listening quietly. Emily stopped him several times to clarify certain points, and wanted to know more about his parents. For his part, Joey was content to sit and talk in the comfort of a warm room, good friends, and a full belly. It felt good to share the secrets he'd been keeping for so many years and it was good practice for his debut with the law.

  "That's quite a story, Joey," was Doris' sole comment on what she had heard. "Do you think you'll go to jail for any of it?"

  "Naw," he scoffed. "Well, at least I don't think so." Considering the bare possibility. "I hope not, anyway. What do you think? Do you think they would do that to me?" Once the possibility of incarceration was open to question, worry entered into the breach. He began to nibble at a fingernail.

  "Don't chew your nails, Joey. Your hands look bad enough already," Doris scolded.

  "You should put some aloe vera on them," Emily suggested.

  "Never mind my hands. Do you think they might put me in jail?"

  The two women conferred by glance and Doris answered him. "To my mind, taking on what's-his-name's identity sounds like just a stupid thing to do by a young kid who didn't know any better. The problem would be that you're not a kid any more, and you're still doing it. And you know how the state can be. If they decide to hang you out to dry, well, you have a problem. You need to talk to a lawyer."

  "It's a mess, Joey," agreed Emily. "You should get a lawyer."

  Joey began to chew on a nail again, realized it, and clasped his hands together on the table. "Louis said the same thing." He paused and made up his mind. "Okay. This is what I'm going to do: I'm going to the police, see what they have to say, and then I'll decide about a lawyer. If I don't face them today, well, tomorrow will be harder. And I don't want them to pick me up off the street, so I'm going."

  Emily gave him a few seconds before changing the subject. "You were sick with the flu, huh?"

  "Yeah, it was one of those over-night things. I'm fine now."

  "Have you given any thought to our proposal?" Emily asked.

  Doris looked at her with one eyebrow raised. "Jeez, Em, don't you think he's got enough to think about? Give him a break."

  Joey was left out of it now. Emily faced her partner. "Look. I'll never have a better time. I'm at the top of my cycle. And he," pointing an accusing finger at Joey, "he might be going to prison, for who knows how long."

  Doris, with a straight face, looked at Joey, who looked back at her, stunned. Doris then turned again to Emily, whose expression was pure determination. Doris fell apart into loud guffaws. Emily held out for only a few seconds before she broke down into laughter, also. And then Joey was infected with their spirit and he, too, laughed, but only lightly and somewhat uncertainly.

  "Hell, Joey," Doris gibed, "You're going to prison anyway, it's probably the closest thing to sex with a woman you're going to see in a long time." She and Emily broke out into fresh peals of laughter.

  Even though they were laughing at his expense, Joey didn't feel mocked. He could still smile, feeling the humor and the absurdity of his situation. And though his feelings were partly of sadness and regret, he loved these two friends of his as though they were blood sisters to him. They were all three outside the norm. All three socially suspect, somehow not part of the legitimate world. Louis too, for that matter. Joey supposed that their otherness was a part of what drew them together, but mostly, it was heart. Heart was the connection. Heart was what mattered.

  "So," he said, "how do we go about it?"

  Doris and Emily stopped laughing, but kept their smiles. Tenuous, small smiles, but smiles none the less. "Yeah? You'll do it?" Emily's response was direct, but not insensitive. She looked to Doris to give practical directions.

  Doris read the look from her partner that told her to get on with it before the chance was lost. She was, as always, direct. "Simple," she said, "you take a cup into the bathroom, do your thing. I take the cup, transfer the contents in a manner which will not concern you, and we all wait weeks to see if anything happens."

  Joey's expression was blank, but only for a second. He was filled with resolve. "All right. Let's do it." He slapped his hands on the table and stood up. Doris and Emily both stood. Doris went to a cupboard, vocalizing the theme from 'Mission Impossible', "Daa,da,dum, daa,da,da..." She returned with an eight-ounce waxed paper cup and handed it to Joey. "Don't fill it to more than a half-inch below the rim," she said, poker faced. Emily offered him a an issue of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine on his way to the bathroom. "Will this help?" she asked.

  "No, thanks," he said. Ten minutes later, after plucking his red cap from where it hung on a peg near the door, he was back on the street, only a little embarrassed.

  .

  Mary Hartz was presently using Knowles' desk, since the DEA agents had taken over hers. They had seized upon the information about Joey's use of another identity and were using her phone to put the many-tentacled machinery of federal law into motion. Before leaving the area of her desk, Mary had heard them talking to a revenue agent for the IRS and someone in the office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration. Ostensibly, their purpose was to use contacts with their federal brethren to quickly access information in those offices, but Mary knew that once Warnecki's name was fed into the ponderous maw of the federal bureaucracy, his life would be chewed exceedingly fine before it was finally either spit out or digested.

  Knowles used his desk as little as possible, so it wasn't much of an intrusion into his space. She was opening a drawer to find some scrap paper when he returned to the bullpen after visiting with Meredith Adams to investigate her complaint. He hadn't removed his mirrored sunglasses after leaving the sunny world outside, and approached his desk to find her rummaging in the drawer.

  "Charlie," she greeted him, "the Man With No Eyes."

  "Who?" he asked.

  "You know, the guy in Cool Hand Luke."

  "Who?"

  "Never mind, Charlie." She pawed through a rat's nest of candy wrappers and other trash. "What a mess. Don't you have a trash basket?" She emerged with a book. "Hey, this isn't the book you had before, it it?" She held it up.

  Knowles removed his glasses to see it in better light. "Sure it is," he said, "I haven't had a chance to return it yet."

  "No, it's not." She shook the book at him. " 'Force of Nature,' same author, different title. Guess you liked the first one, eh?"

  Knowles didn't reply to her accusation. Instead, he returned the sunglasses to his face and turned away, saying, "Got to check the front for messages."

  .

  Joey's footsteps had become slower over the three blocks betwe
en the restaurant and the police station. Still, they eventually led him all the way to the front walk. Brulick, exiting the front door, saw him turning onto the walkway that led from street to station. He actually drew his weapon to accost him, shouting, "Freeze, hands over your head!" Joey froze, eyes and mouth opening wide in shock. Brulick approached him, spun him around, and cuffed him, before returning gun to holster and frog-marching him into the department.

  Knowles watched the entire process from inside the doors. "Got yourself a dangerous one, Brulick? Don't you think you should have called for backup before going up against him? He might have smacked you with his hat or something."

  "Shut up, Knowles. You don't know how dangerous he might be. Just go tell the chief that I got him."

  Knowles walked back to Sims' desk, instead, shaking his head all the way. "Bootlick's out front with Warnecki," he told him. "Asshole actually drew his gun, cuffed him. Right on the front walk while the guy was coming in to see us."

  "Shit," Sims said, rising and returning to the front with Knowles. "Just what we need. Make the guy feel safe coming to us. Inspire him to talk with our kind intentions."

  Brulick was frisking Joey, who was facing the wall. Sims said, "Take the cuffs off him and go tell the chief that Warnecki came in on his own."

  "Am I under arrest?" asked an obviously frightened Joey over his shoulder.

  "I think we should leave them on," Brulick said, one hand on Joey's back. He was reluctant to hand over his prize to Sims.

  "I'm the investigating officer and I'm telling you to take them off. And even if I weren't, you're an idiot for putting handcuffs on someone who's coming in on his own without an arrest warrant." Sims got right into Brulick's face with the lecture. Reluctantly, he removed the cuffs and stalked away to Sloan's office.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Warnecki. That was entirely unnecessary. Come on back to my desk and talk." Sims hoped that he could undo the damage that Brulick had done and calm the nervous man that stood before him, rubbing his wrists.

  "Are you arresting me now?" Joey repeated.

  "Ah, well, not at the moment. I'd just like to talk to you for a moment, get our priorities straight, so to speak." Strictly speaking, official charges had not yet been filed, but Sims knew they would be, including the complaint by Meredith Adams, who had not been to the department as yet. He would have to tread carefully.

  Taking a seat behind his desk, he invited Joey to sit on a straight-backed wooden chair that stood beside it. Joey sat and looked up at Knowles, who still wore his sunglasses and was standing close beside him. "Knowles, how about getting Mary to help me out here?" She would be much less intimidating to Warnecki than the glowering Knowles, who took the cue and left.

  "Do you mind if I make a quick call to my neighbor? I told him I'd call when I got here." Joey wanted Louis to reassure him.

  "Armstrong? Sure, just dial nine for an outside line," Sims said generously and sat back, folding his arms. Let Warnecki lower his anxiety level and relax.

  Louis answered on the first ring, obviously waiting for the call. "You just get there, Joey?" he asked.

  "Yeah, I stopped at Emily and Doris'. Thought I'd let you know."

  "They arrest you for anything?"

  "No, not yet." Uncertainly.

  "Not yet? Are they going to?"

  "I'm not sure. Maybe."

  "Listen up. I called the place that handled some business for me a couple of years back. They said they'd have someone down there right away, soon as I called. You don't say nothing until he gets there, hear?"

  "Do you think that's necessary?"

  "Don't be a fool, boy. You do as I say."

  "Well, okay Lou, I guess."

  "Take care, now," Louis ended, and hung up.

  Mary had taken a chair from the next desk and put it in the aisle, blocking traffic there and causing people to detour around their space. She introduced herself when Joey put down the phone. "Hi, Mr. Warnecki," she said with a friendly smile and shook his hand. "I'm Mary Hartz. Glad to finally meet you."

  "Hi," Joey smiled back and, letting the smile disappear, turned back to Sims. "Uh, well, Louis suggested that if I'm going to be arrested that I ought to have a lawyer here."

  "Well, you certainly have that right," Sims replied, remaining upbeat, the soul of cooperation. "Though I was hoping you might wait until we got a few things out of the way, first."

  "Actually, Louis said that a lawyer would be here soon. My intentions," Joey went on, looking at his shoes, "are to get everything straightened out that I can. That's why I came here. I ..."

  He was interrupted by the officer manning the front desk. "Excuse me. Meredith Adams is here to file a complaint. She asked for you."

  Sims felt his friendly manner evaporate. He felt his headache returning. "Mary, would you stay with Mr. Warnecki for a moment?" He left his desk.

  "What happened to your hands?" Mary inquired.

  "They got a little frostbit," Joey answered, clasping them together in his lap and trying to make them look smaller. "I got cut a little bit, too. I suspect that's why Meredith is here."

  "You ought to put some aloe vera on them," she said.

  .

  Meredith was a large-boned woman in her seventies. Tall, gaunt, and broad-shouldered, she wore once-fashionable, out-dated but well maintained apparel of a conservative nature. Her eyes were a steely gray and her similarly toned hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She looked like what she was — an older woman struggling to keep up appearances, when her time of affluence was past, and all glory and conquest were faded away. No matter the battle was lost, defeat could never be admitted.

  She stood apart from others in the constricted space of the reception area. Sims thought she looked particularly out of place there, and lost, like she had found herself in a shelter for the homeless, when she had expected the lobby of the Ritz.

  Sims was generally a straight-forward kind of man, but he wasn't above using what little acting talent he had to forward his agenda. In this instance, believing her complaint to be intemperate, considering the circumstances of the break-in, his objective was to convince her to drop her charges. Also, they were a stumbling-block to his other aims. He considered the best way to handle her as he approached and decided to accommodate her illusions. "Ms Adams," he said, almost bowing, "Let's find a space to discuss your grievance." He felt like a maitre' d', leading patron to table. Where to go. Conference room? No. He walked her into Sergeant Clarkson's office without knocking.

  Clarkson looked up from his desk, ready to chew out whoever dared to intrude on him without leave. Sims preempted him. "Ah, Sergeant," he began, loftily, "would you mind if we used your office for a moment? Ms Adams needs a redress of grievance."

  "What?" Clarkson screwed up his face into a pre-explosion knot.

  "Please, Sergeant, if you don't mind, of course." Sims stood there with a self-deprecating smile on his face.

  Clarkson's fuse fizzled in mid-burn at Sims' outlandish demeanor. "At your service, of course," he said, giving Sims a look full of meaning. Sims would pay, one way or another. But the sergeant did leave the room to them.

  In the end, Sims got her to drop the charges, convincing her that it was a matter of noblesse oblige on her part. Joey's part would be to repay the obligation ten times over, a deal that almost warmed her tight-fisted Yankee heart. And Sims hoped that his work on Joey's behalf would increase his trust in Sims' good intentions.

  With this chip of good will to put on the table in dealing with Warnecki, he returned to his desk to find both Hartz and Warnecki missing. Seeing Knowles at his desk, he approached him to ask where they'd gone.

  "Sloan put them in the interrogation room," Knowles informed him, "and a lawyer just showed up. He's up there with Mary and Warnecki now."

  "Ah, shit," Sims exhaled. "I was hoping to have him alone for a little while. Now I'll probably get nothing out of him."

  "Yeah, well, I don't think the guy has all that m
uch to give you, anyway."

  "There's got to be something. Something that he doesn't know that he knows. Some piece of the pie that will connect to the shooting, maybe connect to the shooting in the harbor this morning, too."

  "Speaking of which," Knowles went on, "LeBeau heard back from his crew on the water and the guys checking out the flats."

  "Yeah? Did they come up with anything?"

  "Nothing in the water. It was still all roiled up. Wasn't likely anyway, the way the current runs through and flushes everything out. But, on the flats there were tire tracks, like from a car and small trailer, backed down to the water where Chubb's Creek Road dead ends. Looks like a small boat was pulled out this morning when the tide was still low."

  "So it looks like the guy didn't crack up, after all. Anything else?"

  "No, that's all, at least so far."

  .

  Daniel Drew of Meahan and Cowles, Attorneys at Law, was a tall, bookish-looking man of twenty-six years. His uncle Martin Cowles had hired him as an associate upon the insistence of his wife, Daniel's aunt Margaret. Uncle Martin had been reluctant to take him on because he viewed Daniel as something of a gadabout, unable to keep to any one course of direction.

  Actually, Daniel was more like a pilgrim, searching for the holy grail of service to humanity. After coming to the conclusion that life as a seminary student was not likely to result in a call to the priesthood, he dropped out to pursue relief work with the Red Cross. After seeing too much of the suffering of mankind at first hand, his life took a curious reversal of direction and he went into accounting. That field proving to dry to his taste, he attended law school and finished the course of study to receive his J.D. His ambition was to practice environmental law and protect the world from polluters. Now he'd been practicing law for two years. Uncle Martin had hired him with the stipulation that Daniel would stay the course for ten years. This had been a difficult commitment for Daniel to make, but one forced on him by the necessity of supporting a new family. Thus far in his career, the practice of law had not shown much promise of bettering the lot of his fellow man to any significant degree, that work consisting largely of real estate and trust work. His uncle pushed him in that direction based on his accounting background, delegating the more interesting work to the three other associates of the firm. Being the only one available on the short notice of Louis' phone call, Daniel was given the nod.

  He found Joey and Mary Hartz in the interrogation room and she left him for fifteen minutes to speak privately with his new client. In this time, Joey acquainted his new lawyer with the facts, as he saw them, of his case.

  "Actually," he confessed to Joey, "I haven't done any criminal work at all. You're my first." 'Fake it until you make it' was not an acceptable rationale to this former seminarian. Joey accepted the credentials of his counselor without question or reservation. Daniel's earnestness spoke more to Joey than his experience.

  .

  There were two entrances to the cramped space of the interrogation room. One opened into the upstairs corridor that also led to the offices of the chief and the lieutenant and to the conference room. The other entrance was from a small viewing room, complete with requisite one-way glass and hidden microphone. This is the route taken by Sims to enter the room now occupied by Warnecki and his lawyer and Mary Hartz. Sims was surprised, but not very, to find Sloan and Brulick standing at the one-way glass on his way through. He wondered if they had been standing there when lawyer and client were supposedly conferring in private. The two DEA man followed Sims into the viewing room and remained there when Sims continued into the interrogation room.

  Mary Hartz was in the process of explaining the charges that were likely to be brought against Joey by his assumption of another's identity. She covertly signaled her awareness of their audience to Sims with her eyes as he took the sole remaining chair at the end of the small, scarred wooden table. The table was bolted to the floor, as was the chair occupied by Warnecki. The other three chairs were of the gray, metal, folding type.

  Sims introduced himself to Drew and then turned to Joey. "I convinced Meredith Adams to not file a complaint against you."

  This was good news. One down, a hundred to go. "That's good," Joey said, "Thanks. I'm surprised, really. She can be difficult to deal with. How'd you do it?"

  "Well, actually, I made some promises on your behalf," Sims replied, somewhat self-consciously. "I told her you'd repair the damage and more. Probably a few days more. You'll have to work that out with her."

  "That's fine. I counted on making it up to her, anyway. If I'm not in jail." Joey looked worried about this eventuality. "What about that? The possibility of jail, I mean."

  "Well," Sims answered, looking at Joey and his lawyer alternately, "you understand that I can't make any promises. That's not up to me or the department. But, having spoken with the district attorney and the judge, I think it possible that you may be able to avoid jail time. At least at the state level. And your cooperation at this stage could go a long way toward making things easier on you. The federal stuff is anyone's guess."

  "Look." Sims changed course. He became more intense. "I'm interested in finding out who shot you. I'm interested in finding out how the cocaine came to be in your house. I want your full cooperation on these things and I don't think your connection to either is criminal. That's what I believe and I am proceeding on that basis." He sat back to see what the reaction to his statements would be.

  Daniel Drew locked his hands behind his head, leaned back, and looked at the cobwebs in a ceiling corner. He meditated on them for a full three minutes before rejoining the group. "Okay. Here's the way I see it," he reflected. "It does appear that there is little likelihood of my client further incriminating himself in answering your questions on these issues. I would only insist that any questions be asked in my presence and on my advice to my client." He turned to Joey. "That sound okay with you?"

  Joey shrugged and folded his hands in his lap. "Sure, I guess." He looked at Sims. "So what do you want to know?" Mary prepared to make notes.

  "First thing: Do you know of anyone who might have been the one to shoot you?"

  Joey didn't even pause to think. "No," he answered.

  "Have you received any threats, written or spoken, in the last few months."

  "None at all that I can recall. Not like violent threats. I suppose I get my share of crap from other drivers, and maybe a pissed-off customer or two, but I wouldn't call them real threats."

  Sims felt the unseen presence on the other side of the glass. The hell with it, he thought. "Next: I want to know everything you did and everyone you saw on last Monday."

  Joey recounted the events of that day in the same order that Sims had gotten from Louis Armstrong, adding a breakfast stop and prepping some stock in his garage workshop.

  "Charles Adams was upset with you on Monday evening."

  Joey blushed. "Yeah, well, he thought I was sleeping on his time. But I wouldn't try to charge him for something like that. It was so warm upstairs and I just fell asleep waiting on some epoxy to set up, so I could remove the clamps and go home. I don't know why he was so pissed off." Joey's eyebrows went up. "Not that he was pissed off enough to shoot me. Good god, I don't think that."

  Sims tone became casual. "No, doesn't seem likely. Who else was there with Adams when you came downstairs?"

  "Well, Chief Sloan was there, and Woody Trott. That's all, I think."

  Mary spoke. "Elwood Trott? The biker guy?"

  "Yeah. You know Woody?" Joey asked as though discovering a mutual friend.

  Mary snorted. "Every cop in Rock Harbor knows Elwood Trott. Probably most of the cops from Kennebunk to Bar Harbor. I've stopped him on the road half a dozen times myself. Are you a friend of his?" Her question implied that Elwood Trott was a loser and likewise any friends of his.

  Joey took her opinion with a grain of salt. "Well, we grew up together, in school and all . . ."

  "Elwood went to school?" Mary fei
gned astonishment. Sims let her go on with it, sensing she had some purpose.

  "Oh, well, only to the tenth grade. He dropped out at sixteen, got into the motorcycle thing. Went to California for a while, maybe got into a little trouble there and came home. I see him around once in a while, maybe at Molly's, or on the street. We always got along. He never gave me any trouble. He's actually an alright guy underneath all the tough-guy bullshit."

  "The trouble Elwood got into in California involved drug trafficking and assault. He did two years in the state penitentiary. Was he involved in drugs here, to your knowledge?" Mary pressed the issue.

  "Wait a minute," Drew interrupted. He whispered in Joey's ear.

  "Absolutely not," Joey said out loud to him and then to Mary, "I know he may be involved with some stuff, but I never asked and he never told. We don't deal with each other on any kind of level except like two people who've known each other for a long time and have a beer together once in a while." Mary seemed satisfied with his answer and nodded to Sims to continue.

  "Do you know any reason for Trott to be at the Lion's Club that evening?" Sims asked.

  "No. We didn't even speak. I was so embarrassed by Charles Adams yelling at me that I grabbed my tools and got out of there."

  "And you know of no reason for Trott to hold a grudge against you or cause you harm?"

  "No. Woody and I always got along, no problems." Joey had no doubts.

  "Have you seen Trott since the shooting?"

  "No."

  "Heard from him?"

  "No."

  "Heard of him?" Sims was reaching.

  "No."

  Sims was running out of questions. "Did you know that there was another possible shooting early this morning?"

  Joey looked surprised. "No. Possible shooting? What's that?"

  "There was a shot fired in the harbor this morning, around four. We haven't found a victim, but two shootings in one week in this town is alarming." Sims' posture underwent a subtle shift from hunching forward in query to resting his weight on the table in concern. "Listen," he said, "Someone shot you. Maybe someone was shot or shot at this morning. It's not at all certain that, were you to walk out of here this afternoon, someone might not still want to hurt you. It really bothers me. If there's anything you can think of, anything you can tell me to help me prevent this from happening, say it now."

  "Or forever hold your peace," went the ridiculous refrain in Joey's mind. He didn't know what to think or say. It was totally outside of both his experience and imagination. Joey dealt with problems in one of two ways. Either he faced it head on and dealt with it, or he walked away. The threshold between the two was a quantum one. Right now he wanted to walk away. It was as though his mind shut down and his feet wanted to take over. But, he was stuck in this room with three people whose job it was to deal with these problems and the focus was on him. He turned to his lawyer for help.

  Daniel Drew wanted to help. The priestly potential in him could pat Joey on the back and say, "There, there." The accountant side could help with the morass of tax difficulties Joey was bound to have. And the lawyer could be an advocate with the variety of government agencies that would want a piece of him. But not even the relief worker could keep Joey from being shot again. He was not suited to be a bodyguard, neither in temperament nor physique. Well, he would have to do what he could, and pray about the rest. "Well. Let's see. What are the issues here. One: For my part, I should see what I can do to deal with Mr. Warnecki's legal issues. Two: The police department must do what they can to investigate the shooting,etc. and provide, in whatever ways are reasonable to provide, for Mr. Warnecki's continuing safety. And three: Assuming that I am able to secure Mr. Warnecki's release today, he must exercise all reasonable caution while away from police custody. Now, Officer Sims, would the police department be adverse to Mr. Warnecki's release on his own personal recognizance, if I can persuade the court to do that?"

  Sims considered it. He would have to pass it by Sloan. He said so. And Beiderman was not likely to be a hard-ass on the issue, since the matter of the legality of the search warrant was in question. Drew seemed to be aware of that issue. He could likely use it as a lever. The feds were on their own. That machinery would be slower in grinding up to speed, DEA notwithstanding. Their issues were different, anyway. They'd probably prefer to have Joey on the street where someone could take a potshot at him. It might resolve the problem sooner for them that way.

  "Well then," Drew said to Sims, "why don't we leave Mr. Warnecki in the hands of Officer Hartz while you and I speak to Chief Sloan? Then I can be on my way." Drew and Sims went together into the corridor and then to Sloan's office. The chief must have beaten them there by a few seconds, not wanting to appear overly interested in the goings-on in the interrogation room. The chief fell one notch lower in Sims' esteem, not that it was much of a drop. Brulick, Donovan, and Stennis were the other occupants of the office.

  Surprisingly, to Sims anyway, Sloan had no objection to Daniel Drew's proposal. He acted as though it had been his idea all along. Drew left to return to his client and Sims remained with Sloan. The chief lounged against the corner of his desk, waiting on Sims. The DEA men ranged against the wall and Brulick busied himself with some paperwork on a clipboard, pretending to be unaware of the other four men.

  "You heard," Sims began, "that Warnecki identified the other man at the Lion's Club that evening as Elwood Trott?"

  Sloan smiled and shook his head. "I've been thinking about that evening. And the truth is that Adams and I were alone at that meeting, at least when Warnecki woke up from his nap. Warnecki must have been still dreaming. Or walking in his sleep. Or maybe," raising one eyebrow, "Warnecki has another agenda."

  "Like what?"

  "Like he knows Trott is a dealer. Like he's trying to put the focus on an easy mark, shift suspicion on to someone else. Whatever. All I know is that he's hiding something and we're gonna watch him until he makes a mistake, then grab him. That's why I want him on the street."

  "You think he's dirty." Sims was deadpan.

  "Of course." Sloan was amazed by Sims' credulity. "Why else would he say that Trott was there?" The chief grew serious. "Now look. He can't run, at least not easily now that he has no i.d. and his bank accounts aren't available to him. (Mary had gotten an order to freeze his accounts and had taken his false papers. Joey was essentially a stateless person now. Insofar as anyone is defined by the paper they can carry, Joey was a high school graduate, and nothing else.)

  "So, you want to watch him and let him lead us to the other bad guys." Sims was apparently warming to the idea.

  "Exactly." Sloan pounded palm with fist. "He doesn't have any money. He's got to eat. So he's got to lead us to his stash, the dope from Boston. And when he does, we've got him." It was so simple.

  Sims leaned up against the closed door, hands in his pockets. "So how do you want to do this?"

  Sloan waved away the details. "I'll leave it up to you. Use Hartz and Knowles and Brulick. Just keep an eye on him."

  "Well," ventured Sims, "We should talk to Trott anyway, just so he can deny Warnecki's story, right?"

  "Absolutely. Do that." And Sims was dismissed.

  Donovan and Stennis had been quietly interested in the conversation, but did not interject an agenda of their own, and voiced no objection to Sloan's plan. Sims didn't feel a need to speak with them. As far as he was concerned, they were on their own. He was hoping they would remain out of the way.

  .

  Mary was making small talk to avoid breaking Drew's commandment about asking questions away from his presence. "So you read mysteries and police procedurals, huh?" Her notes were stacked neatly to one side and she absentmindedly tapped with her pencil eraser on the table top.

  "Oh yeah. You looked over the bookcases then."

  Mary shrugged. "Yeah, reason I noticed is that I collect them. I have about fifteen-hundred books. Some duplicates — reading copies of first editions and signed books that I wa
nt to keep nice, you know."

  "Really? That many. I suppose I might have half that. No hardcovers."

  "I noticed. Foil-backs, mostly. Who's your favorite author?"

  Joey thought. "Really couldn't say. I have a lot of favorites."

  "Okay, then what do you reread most often? What do you go back to?"

  Well, I guess I've gone through the Arkady Renko series five or six times. And I go back to the George Smiley books sometimes, too."

  "Good stuff. You like series."

  "Yeah. It's like they have lives, you know? You can follow them book to book, see how they develop."

  Mary considered the fact that much of Warnecki's life was a paper life, too. He had developed a fictional character of his own. Maintaining the fiction, living a story. It must have been a strain. Well, that was about to come to an end and that change would have difficulties of its own. They talked about books until Sims returned to the room.

  "Looks like we're going to cut you loose, Mr. Warnecki, and let the paperwork catch up to you." Sims remained standing. "You and Mr. Drew are expected at the courthouse. Officer Hartz will escort you over there to meet with Judge Biederman and sign some papers, a promise to appear and so on."

  "Now? Already?" Joey was relived to understand he wouldn't have to spend the weekend in a cell.

  "Yes," Sims answered. "You should understand that you shouldn't leave town without informing us and that you are not to leave the state under any circumstances."

  "Not a problem. How about my truck? And can I get some cash from the bank?"

  Sims answered directly. "You do not have a valid driver's license, and I'm afraid you do not have access to your bank accounts, either. Sorry, but you're going to have to figure some other way to get along. At least you're free to use your home now."

  Sims held Mary back for a minute after Joey and his lawyer left the room. "What is your impression of Warnecki?" he asked.

  Mary thought for a moment. "I don't think he's the bad guy. He may be an idiot, but he's not the bad guy."

  .

  Mary walked Joey with his lawyer across the street to the county courthouse where they met the prosecutor and Biederman. They went over the ground rules for his release and set a tentative date for him to appear. Tentative because no one had yet dealt with the probate issues involving his aunt's death and the status of the house Joey resided in. Because that was the only issue wherein the state had missed out on fees, it would be the one to receive the most focus.

  Joey and Daniel Drew stood on the courthouse steps to discuss Joey's future course. "I don't know how or when I'm going to be able to pay you," Joey said.

  "Louis Armstrong hired me to represent you and he has guaranteed all costs involved. He seems to think a great deal of you."

  "Thank you, Louis," Joey said, looking upward as though Louis were an angel watching over him. Then to Daniel, "Where do we go from here?"

  "Luckily for you, I'm good with paper. I'm going to initiate discussion with the various agencies involved and attempt to work things out so that you can get proper papers." He shook his head. "There's so much time gone by since you picked up the other name that it's going to be a real tangle. I won't fool you; it may be a year or more before you have a real life."

  Joey's eyes drifted. The paper that people deal with, incrementally, all through their lives, made a large pile. In Joey's case, that stack loomed all at once. "Well," he said, "one step at a time." They walked together for a block, then separated, Drew continuing straight to his office and Joey turning right onto Water street, which ran three blocks to the harbor, passing by Molly's in the middle of the last block. Joey still had twenty-two dollars and decided to stop for a beer and call Louis with the news.

  .

  Although Molly's was situated a mere hundred yards from the water's edge, it offered no view of the harbor. Crowded in on three sides by old and mostly abandoned fishing shacks, it barely afforded room for the evil-smelling dumpster snugged in tight to the building, let alone parking space for its patrons, of which it had many. People parked on the street or in the refuse-strewn parking lot of the defunct cannery, which terminated the street and blocked public access to the water. The area was a blight on the town and one that provoked endless discussion in town meetings of how to rehabilitate it. Of course, the only solution was to level everything with bulldozers and start fresh, but it was a daunting project and money was lacking. Some suggested that the town take possession of the property, since taxes were much in arrears, but the property owners were prominent in the town, politically.

  Though the Adams family had once held title to all the property surrounding it, that plot occupied by the rusted tin-roofed, concrete-block sided, dirty windowed bar known as Molly's had never been a part of their holdings. The series of bartenders who had owned it were all known as Molly, whatever their proper names, and the original Molly may have been either a woman or a man, a popular argument among regular stool holders at that establishment. Whatever the gender of the original Molly, the bar had begun and remained a dive, a dimly lit and dusty cave whose only amenities were a flickering, color t.v. and a juke box offering tunes from many years past. No pool table, no electronic game machines, and no potted plants. Just a bar, a dozen stools, and six small tables with chairs, every item stained, scratched, and much repaired.

  The odor of the place was typical of establishments of that sort: tobacco smoke and stale beer, overlaid with a faint smell of urine, except in the toilet, which was dominated by the piercing scent of mothballs.

  Not to say it wasn't a comfortable place, at least for the townsfolk that frequented it and found a place there to drink and talk with friends. It offered steamed clams with butter, beer with peanuts in the shell, and shot-glasses of inexpensive whiskey. Even pickled eggs or pigs feet were available for those so inclined. It had been popular for generations of fishermen and other blue-collar workers, who could stroll right in and feel comfortable and welcome, no matter what residue of their profession might cling to their clothing, skin, or hair. Molly's was no fern bar.

  Joey felt right at home there. As he crossed Main Street and strode down the gently sloped, sidewalk-less street that led to Molly's, he anticipated the pleasure of having a large, cool one in complete freedom, with friends, and away from the halls of justice.

  "Pssst," he heard. It sounded like gas escaping from the once green-painted dumpster next to Molly's. It wasn't surprising that what fermented in that dumpster might release gas, but that it might do so audibly, was. He heard it again. "Pssst." He stopped in his tracks and looked. This time the dumpster called his name. "Pssst, Joey." The rusty, drooling dumpster spoke in a hoarse whisper. "Joey, C'mere." Joey was alarmed, but curious enough to investigate. He approached the foul bin cautiously, looking around for witnesses, of which there were none.

  The lid, which was raised an inch above the bin's contents, now lifted another inch to reveal a pair of eyes, surrounded by refuse and what might have been matted hair, or dark seaweed. Joey edged right up to them, despite the aroma of bad shellfish and sour beer that emanated from within. "Who's there?" he whispered, as though confronting the troll under the bridge. It was late in the afternoon and daylight was fading. Within the hour, it would be full dark.

  "It's Woody, Woody Trott," came the muted reply.

  "Woody? Jeez, what the hell are you doing in the dumpster? Get out of there! You could die in there!" Joey exclaimed, loudly.

  "No shit. Keep it down, would you? I don't want anybody to know I'm here." The voice was urgent, but suppressed.

  "Well, you sure picked a place where no one would look for you." Joey moderated his voice a trifle, still overwhelmed by surprise and trepidation.

  "Yeah, yeah." The eyes shifted left and right, watching for passers-by. They settled again on Joey. "You gotta get me out of here, man, get me to my sister's, somewhere safe."

  Joey stepped back a pace. The smell was overpowering. "Aren't you cold, Woody? How long you been in t
here?"

  "All day, man." The creature rolled its eyes. "Never mind, man. Just get a car, something, get me out of here. I'm wounded, man, just do it!" The eyes flashed with exhortation. "And get back here before the dumpster guy comes to make a pickup."

  "Okay, okay, let me think." Joey's truck was out of the question. He could try to borrow Doris' and Emily's old Chevy Suburban. It had an advertisement for the restaurant painted on the door, so it was somewhat conspicuous, but it was the closest vehicle he could borrow without lengthy explanation. "Woody, I'll be right back." He turned to go.

  A police cruiser pulled to the side of the road, next to the alleyway where Joey stood talking to a dumpster. The window on the passenger side rolled down electrically to reveal Officer James Brulick. "What are you doing there, Warnecki?" came the high tenor voice from inside.

  "I put a coffee cup in the dumpster," Joey replied, approaching the car and blocking the view. The lid of the dumpster settled down quietly and the eyes were lost to view. "What do you want?" Joey asked innocently. Brulick fixed him with the steeliest eyes he could muster and didn't reply, rolling the window up and pulling away slowly, instead. Joey watched him turn around in the cannery parking area and drive past again, before glancing back at the closed dumpster and then returning the way he had come.

  .

  Doris was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to reconcile the books for the business, when the buzzer sounded, announcing someone at the side door. No one was expected, but Doris was not a timid woman, afraid to confront an unexpected visitor at her alley door in the dark. She slammed the accounting ledger closed and went to answer the buzzer. She was only a bit surprised to find Joey at the door. Not that she didn't like Joey, she did. And not that he wouldn't ordinarily be welcome at her door, because he would be. But, she didn't want him hanging around acting like he was a father or something. As far as she was concerned, he'd done his job and now had to stand out of the way, like an uncle, or something. It had been a concern of hers, one that her partner had dismissed in her drive to be a mother. "Joey," she said, "what's up?" Blocking the door, arms crossed.

  "Hi, Doris. Listen, I need a favor."

  "Yeah?" she said suspiciously, "What's that?"

  "I need to borrow your Suburban. Just for a little while." Joey was earnest, not at all acting like a regretful sperm donor.

  Doris was relieved. "Sure, Joey, no problem." She didn't ask why. "I'll get the keys." She was back in less than a minute.

  "Thanks Doris," Joey said. "I'll get it back by morning, if it gets too late to return it tonight. That all right?"

  "That's fine, Joey. We don't need it until tomorrow afternoon. Bye,bye." She started to close the door, relieved.

  "Wait a minute," he said.

  "What." Hesitating.

  "Well," he said hesitantly, "how's Em? I mean, how did it go?"

  "Emily's been standing on her head for six hours, Joey." She still filled the doorway. "I'm trying to get her to relax, you know?"

  "Yeah," Joey said thoughtfully, uncomprehending. "Well, good luck, anyway. I wish you the best, you know. That's all."

  Doris relented. "Thanks, Joey. I know. See you tomorrow." And she began to close the door again.

  "Wait a minute. Do you have a tarp or something?"

  Doris hesitated. "What for?"

  "Well, I just wanted to cover the seat to keep it clean, you know?"

  Doris looked him up and down. He looked clean enough. Never mind. "There's an old shower curtain in the back that I don't care about."

  "Perfect, thanks." Joey walked toward the back of the alley while Doris watched and wondered why he needed to cover the seat.

  .

  Joey eased the old blue Suburban to the side of the road in front of Molly's and backed in to the dumpster. He got out and open the rear door as the lid to the dumpster popped open. The figure that emerged was like some surreal jack-in-the-box, sodden, and reeking of brine, stale beer, and clam juice, and stuck overall with peanut shells and disintegrating paper napkins. Elwood Trott was not a pretty sight. In other circumstances, the sight he presented might have provoked laughter, but Joey focused on the way his left hand held on to his right shoulder. A dark red stain spread from under that hand to cover the side of his shirt and tinted the garbage stuck there.

  Elwood was a large man, standing over six feet tall and weighing upwards of two-hundred and fifty pounds. His full, black beard and shoulder-length hair were matted and flecked with bits of refuse from the bin. He wore a ratty denim vest, bleached to the palest of blues over a once-white tee-shirt and torn blue jeans. Black leather engineer boots with chain straps completed his ensemble, and as he crawled over the edge of the dumpster to the ground, the crack of his substantial ass presented itself to Joey's view above the low waistline of his belt-less jeans. Standing on the ground a foot from Joey, stooping from obvious fatigue, the stench that emanated from him was almost overpowering. Joey hastened to spread the yellow, daisy-patterned, plastic shower curtain on the bed in the rear of the truck. "Lie down on that," Joey instructed and Elwood climbed onto it, slumping to the floor of the truck in exhaustion. Joey closed the door on him and got into the cab after checking for activity on the road.

  The way was clear and the last light of day was fading. The transfer from dumpster to truck had taken less than a minute and no traffic had passed. Joey drove onto the street and stopped at its intersection with Main Street. He spoke over his shoulder, "Where do you want to go?"

  The voice from the back said, "Take me to my sister's place in Beer Can Park." Bierken Park was a trailer park on the west side of town. It was the same trailer park where Joseph Wojciehowski and his father had lived. As trailer parks go, it was on the low end of the scale, but it provided a place for people of modest means to live, and folks have to live somewhere.

  Elwood's sister had been a few years behind them in school, but she had grown up fast, and by the age of twenty had borne three children, who now lived with their father in Camden. Sophie Trott had been an early convert to the Church of Crack Cocaine and the court had seen fit to remove her children from that parish several years ago. Lately, Sophie had found another faith, in the form of a fundamentalist Baptist Church, and her transformation had been remarkable. Where once she might stand on street corners attempting to sell herself for dope, now she spent time on those same corners passing out tracts for hope. Her metabolism had been changed by the drug use, and she had never gained back the weight lost during her former addiction. The wear from years of dissipation was still evident in her face, but now that face was clean, and if some people ridiculed her for the flip-flop in her life, still others, Joey among them, saw the change as a better chance for survival. She was trying to get her act together and trying to get her children back.

  Joey made a left turn onto Main Street and drove slowly, mindful that he did not have a driver's license, and watching for the police. Main Street shut down for business at half-past five, even on a Friday evening. In the summertime, it was different, with vacationers prowling the street with money to spend, but shortly after Labor Day, it was as though someone pulled a big switch and all the lights went out. Late November was a quiet time in Rock Harbor. Three blocks down Main Street, Joey bore right at a blinking yellow traffic light and cruised along Trevor Street. Three miles of residential neighborhoods past the entrance to Frenchman's Hill State Park brought him and his silent passenger to the forty trailers that made up Bierken Park.

  "Woody?" Joey hadn't heard from Elwood since leaving the dumpster behind and was concerned about his wellbeing. The smell that had its source in the back of the Suburban had crept forward during the ride and was now strong in Joey's nostrils.

  "Yeah," came a voice from behind. His passenger was still alive, though he didn't smell that way. Joey turned right into the trailer park and slowed, passing the tightly packed row of metal-skinned boxes. In the summer, he knew, the small plots allotted each trailer would be bereft of any but the hardiest of
weeds, anything else crushed under the feet of children with much energy and little room to expend it. Now, with snow covering the ground, a thousand paths and trampled patches showed where traffic occurred and children met to play. The life that must have been evident during the day had retreated to the warmth indoors, now that darkness had fallen and the heat of the sun had been lost. There was no snow atop the poorly insulated trailers, excepting those few left vacant for the cold season, some residents migrating south every year.

  "Which one is Sophie's? I've never been to her place." Joey slowed to a crawl.

  "Keep going straight. Her's is the last one on the right." Elwood sounded worn to exhaustion.

  At the terminus of the dead-end road, plows had piled the snow to the height of a man and the children had used that minor mountain to construct opposing forts of snow, complete with breastworks and tunneled caves, to make war upon one another with snowballs, the preferred weapon of the season. Some of the less accurately thrown missiles spotted the adjoining trailer to the right. Joey pulled to a stop behind an ancient, rust-blotched, yellow, Datsun sedan in the adjoining driveway. Bumper stickers with evangelical themes covered much of the rust and might even have provided structural support to the vehicle, as it provided spiritual support to its driver.

  "Help me out. I'm all stiffened up," came the voice from the back. Joey saw a face appear in the end window of the trailer as he got out of the vehicle and went to the rear to assist his passenger. Elwood was indeed stiff and Joey had to help him to swing his legs to a position where he could climb out. Joey did so with gestures as much as actual physical help, reluctant to touch the slimy fabric covering Elwood's legs and making sure that nothing could jump onto his own clothing. Elwood finally stood on his own, shivering, and Joey walked a safe distance behind him to the door at the side of the trailer.

  "Holy shit." Her reaction was a forgivable lapse in discipline to her new deity, considering the unexpected aroma and appearance at her door of her wayward brother. "Woody, what the hell." Two strikes. Then, recovering enough to remember the requirements of her new order, she stood back from her door, allowing the two men to enter. Joey closed the door behind him and stood silently, not too closely to Elwood, as Sophie looked the two of them up and down. "Joey, you sit there," was her greeting to him and she pointed to a chair at the worn, formica-topped table behind her. "Woody, strip right there and don't touch anything, or I'll kill you." Elwood was the antichrist, straight from a reeking hell and she meant to control the foul beast.

  Woody obediently stripped naked, perhaps too weakened to do battle with his spiritual opposition, and stuffed all his clothing into a black plastic trash bag that Sophie opened at arm's length before him. Only his boots were left to stand and represent his former biker regalia. She opened the door and tossed the bag into the snow outside. The stripped, hairy behemoth that was Elwood Trott attempted to cover his privates before the wrathful archangel that was his sister. "Shower," she ordered. Apparently, demons must be cleaned before being judged and sentenced to damnation. Stoop-shouldered, he obeyed her command and soon Joey heard the shower running and Sophie returned to sit opposite him at the table.

  "Hi, Sophie," he offered weakly. Despite the fact that she wore a flower-print dress and no stockings, her presence was commanding, authoritative. In school, she had been slightly overweight, but with the same heavy bone structure and rounded musculature of her sibling. Her post-addiction weight loss left her with hardened contours, but the same sense of strength. Determination and conviction had been added to her features, giving her an altogether indomitable and forbidding appearance, accentuated by her long, black hair and the gray streaks that flowed from her temples. She'd been through a lot, and it showed on her face in lines of harsh experience, and eyes that bore down without relenting. She made Joey feel uncomfortable, even without having delivered this mess to her doorstep.

  "Talk to me, Joey. What's going on?" Her voice was all business.

  Joey explained the circumstances of finding her brother in the dumpster and his ignorance of how he came to be there. "And that's all I know," he ended, and shrugged.

  "You found him there and brought him here," she said.

  "Yeah." He shrugged again. "This is where he wanted to go."

  "I have two felony convictions, I'm on parole, I'm trying to get my kids back, and you brought him here. I assume he's in trouble. He's always in trouble and if there's a warrant out for him, and I'm found to be harboring a fugitive, I'll not only lose any chance of having my kids live with me, but I'll probably go to prison myself. Now, why would you want to put me in that position?"

  Her consideration for the consequences for rash action had matured more than was the case for Joey. He was new to the process. He didn't know how to answer her. A friend had asked for help and he had given it, without thought of any repercussions to himself or anyone else. "I didn't know what else to do, he said. "If you want us to leave, well, then we'll go somewhere else."

  If he had said anything else, if he had tried to appeal to her new Christian principles or tried to manipulate her in any way, her heart would have denied him. But by simply handing her the option of casting them out without pleading a case, she relented. By his yielding the ground of battle immediately, mercy became her only recourse, though not without some resentment on her part. She wore a bracelet on her wrist with the initials 'WWJD', meaning 'what would Jesus do?' The idea of mercy was difficult for her, since she had seen so little of it shown to her throughout her own hard life. By nature and upbringing, she was an Old Testament kind of gal, eye for an eye, and all that. In her new cosmic view, though, mercy was all tied up with grace, and grace was central to the faith that she had bought into. It was an issue that she was working on. If Joey was a native to the process without being aware of it, she was an immigrant trying to assimilate an alien culture, and fighting for every hard-won inch.

  Elwood emerged from the shower, pink and dripping. His right shoulder bore a puckered, red-rimmed hole, from which a thin line of diluted blood seeped down to his elbow. His lank hair was plastered to his scalp and shoulders and he wore a threadbare towel like a skirt. Sophie walked up to him and sniffed. "Again," she said, and her brother returned to the shower.

  Sophie sat again at the table to face Joey. She regarded his hands, which were flaked with peeling skin and bore a large, irregular scab on the back of his right hand. She had previously noted the stitches on his head. "You're messed up," she said. "Are you involved in something illegal with Woody?"

  "No, not at all," protested Joey. "I've had some trouble, but I haven't been into anything with Woody. Me running into him is just coincidence."

  "So what is it that you've been into?" asked Sophie Trott. She apparently hadn't been watching the television news this past week.

  Joey gave her his story, as far as he knew. "... and I'm trying to get everything straightened out now," he concluded. "My being here shouldn't cause you any problems."

  His reassurance didn't carry a great deal of weight with her and she would have told him so, but Elwood emerged from his second cleansing and asked if she had anything that he could wear. Sophie got up from the table and walked back into the combination living and bedroom beyond the bath.

  Joey used his time alone to look about the kitchen. Every surface was worn but clean, scoured to within an inch of its life. The faux wood-patterned plastic cabinet fronts retained little resemblance to wood, having been scrubbed through to the substrate beneath in most places. The sink fixtures had lost every trace of their original nickel plating. The counters were clear of any clutter and what little wall space existed was free of adornment. Not even a calendar hung on the walls. There were shades to pull for privacy, but no curtains. Altogether, it was a stark living space, with little to mark it for a home. Joey figured that Sophie had cleared away every trace of her old life and had yet to replace it with anything personal that might define a comfortable place in her new one. Too sober, he thought.


  Elwood and Sophie returned to the kitchen, Elwood wearing a black tee-shirt that was only a bit too tight for him and navy-blue sweat pants that rode up on his calves. The heels of his feet hung over the backs of a pair of pink plastic flip-flops. He sat at the table and his sister stood to his side and peeled the sleeve of his tee-shirt up over his shoulder to examine the wound. A bullet had apparently passed through the meat of his arm above the biceps. It had left a neat, circular hole on each side, dark in the center with coagulated blood and rimmed with red. The light from the circular fluorescent fixture in the ceiling gave the wound an ugly, purple cast. Joey couldn't detect any trace of the odor that had emanated from him before.

  "I'm going to get some peroxide," Sophie said, and retrieved a brown plastic bottle from the bath. She poured from the bottle over both ends of the bullet hole, catching the runoff with a frayed dish towel. The peroxide foamed in the hole. She poured again and blotted with the towel. If it stung at all, Elwood didn't let it show on his face. "You need to see a doctor, Woody. This could get infected, especially since you were covered in garbage all day. I can only clean the outside. Who knows what's inside." She peered closely at his shoulder, as though she was straining to see what might lie inside, hidden from view.

  Elwood shook his head. "Can't do that," he said, looking down and avoiding the eyes of the others.

  Sophie took his bearded chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. "Why not?" she asked. Her grip did not allow any evasion.

  He looked her straight in the eye and said, " 'Cause if I do, I'm fucked, that's why."

  She held on to his chin, squeezing more tightly, so that his jaw opened. "Don't you curse in my house. You tell me straight on, what's going on with you, or I'll throw you out into the snow, brother or not." Her face might have been carved from stone, for all the compassion it showed. He would tell the truth or she would throw him out. That was clear.

  "How did you get so hard?" he asked, to deflect her.

  "I've always been hard," she answered without hesitation. "But now I'm hard with a purpose. You try to be hard. You only think you're hard, but you're not. You're all front, with nothing behind it but a bad attitude. Now tell me what's going on." She released his chin and sat down, still holding his gaze.

  Elwood sighed. "Okay." He looked at Joey. "I owe it to you anyway. Believe it or not, you're the center of all this, though you don't even know it." He shook his head slowly, and droplets of water released from the ends of his long, matted hair onto his shoulders. He looked at Joey from lowered brows. "If you hadn't come downstairs when you did, everything would be cool right now." His eyes accused Joey of something, and Joey couldn't imagine what it might be. "I'd be swimming in money right now, and not sitting here with a hole in my shoulder."

  Sophie saw through her sibling. "Wait a minute," she said, holding her hands out before her. "Either Joey did something wrong or he didn't. You said," and she pointed at her brother, "that he didn't know what was going on. So don't put anything on him that doesn't belong there. Own what's yours. Tell it straight." At this point in her life, Sophie rejected all but what might speak to the heart of a matter. No bullshit allowed.

  Elwood raised a meaty left paw and rubbed at his jaw. His right arm rested in his lap. "Do you remember," he began, "when I dumped my bike, first week of October?" Sophie shrugged and Joey nodded. "My left leg was pinned under the bike and I couldn't get leverage to get it off me and I was stuck there like I was nailed to the road. This was out on Baylor Road, on the flats past the bait shop. Lot of dried mud on the road, washed up during a storm. Well, who should show up to come to my aid but Chief Asshole Sloan and his dickhead sidekick, what's-his-name. Nobody around, no traffic for like a half an hour, until Sloan, who lives out there at the end of the road, drives up and stops his car about a foot from my head. His idea of a joke, I guess. Little pissant gets off on intimidating people that can't fight back.

  "My bad luck, a couple of squares of coke wrapped in tinfoil spilled out of my shirt pocket, out of my reach. Wouldn't you know, Sloan goes right to them and checks 'em out. 'Well,well,' he says, 'look what we have here.' Son-of-a-bitch was happy as a pig in shit." Here he paused, remembering. Joey was listening intently, anxious for him to continue. Sophie sat back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest, not really wanting to be a part of her brother's story, nor his life, but needing to know what kind of trouble had been brought to her door.

  "Sloan squats down, just out of my reach, and looks at me for a while, thinking. He keeps looking at me and says to Bootlick, that's his name, says, 'Jimmy, take a little walk, I want to talk to Mr. Trott alone for a minute.' Bootlick goes off down the road without a word, not even wanting to know what's going on. Then Sloan says, 'Listen Trott, there's a way you can walk away from this.' And he's shaking the squares in his hand, like he's rattling dice, or something. 'You interested?' he says.

  "Well, shit. Here I am, lying in the road looking at a drug bust. What am I gonna say? No?" Elwood blew out a breath in a raspberry. " 'Hell, sure,' I said. 'Get this fucking hog off of me and tell me what you want.' " Elwood looked between Joey and his sister, waiting for what he was sure would be their approval of his decision. It was not forthcoming. Both his listeners sat still, waiting for him to go on. He shook his head at the apparent unsophistication of his audience.

  "Turns out," Elwood went on, "Sloan was looking for a connection, a connection for quantity, wholesale. Can you believe that shit?" Elwood wanted a reaction from his listeners. He got one from Joey, whose eyes rounded. Sophie merely looked impatient, as though a chief of police might be expected to do no less in her world.

  "Did he want a connection to buy, or to sell?" asked Joey.

  "To sell, man, to sell. What do you think of that?" Elwood had been wanting an opportunity to share this rare story. He would have preferred an audience closer to his immediate peer group, namely other bikers who would respond to it in the appropriate manner, but Joey and his sister would have to do. Up until now he had had to play everything close to the chest, and if word got around to the wrong people, he could be telling his tale to fellow inmates in the state prison. That threat was not immediate with his present listeners. At least not with Joey, though his sister was not entirely known to him. She wasn't exactly squirming in discomfort, but her body language was less than welcoming.

  "Woody," she said, "you're going to make me an accessory after the fact. I think you're going to have to leave."

  Elwood stared at her. "Gonna throw your only brother, your flesh and blood out into the cold?" he asked sarcastically.

  The barb was not entirely without effect. She spoke down into her lap. "I can't afford to be charged with harboring a fugitive, that's all. I'd never get my kids back."

  Elwood laughed and she looked up in surprise. "I'm not a fugitive," he said. "They think I'm dead. Food for the fishies. Nobody's looking for me." He looked pleased with himself.

  "Well," Joey interjected, "that's not entirely true." Their eyes swung to him. "Actually, I think some police are looking to question you, because I told them that you were with Adams and Sloan last Monday at the Lion's Club. They wanted to know everything I did before I got shot." Joey was apologetic. He turned to Sophie. "I don't want to put you in a bad position. We'll go somewhere else." And he turned back to Elwood. "But I've got to hear the rest of it, at least the parts that concern me. My life has come apart in just a week. I want to know why."

  Elwood regarded Joey for a moment and then spoke to Sophie without taking his eyes from him. "Alright Sis, we'll go somewhere's else. Wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable or anything."

  Sophie exhaled, still looking down. She was in conflict. She feared that her self-interest was taking precedent over her duties of faith. And that her sense of duty was legalistic instead of by love, which was the supposed basis of her faith. It was a mess. She couldn't work it out. She shook her head and gave it up. "Shit," she said, "Stay as long as you need to. Whatever I have is yours. I'
m sorry." A tear made its way to the corner of her mouth and she wiped it away.

  This, in fact, was the true moment of her conversion. All of her life, she had existed on her own substantial reservoir of strength. Even her choice of faith had been an act of pure will, without any admission of personal weakness, or need for a superior strength. Christianity had been a pragmatic choice, a methodology to get her life in order, and to regain custody of her children. Allowing her brother to stay, and offering her unfettered help, had been her first true act of faith. Now it remained to be seen what would be its result.

  Elwood, for one, was touched and amazed. In all his life, he'd never seen his sister shed a single tear. All through their childhood together, alternately abused or neglected, she had seemed to have an impenetrable shell of indifference and self-preservation. He had modeled himself on his younger sister, feeding on her strength to create his own persona. Now he felt a stirring of something akin to tenderness toward her. It was out of character, and if anyone but Joey had been there to see, it would have been impossible, but now he stood and went around the table to her, and hugged her with both arms. The implausibility of this act was lost on Joey, who saw it as a perfectly natural response. Sophie, on the other hand, who had never been the recipient of such concern from her brother, received it with more tears. It was an event to shatter the earth, and Joey didn't even realize it.

  .

  It was six o'clock and Sims had been home for an hour. Both his daughters were home and June was on her way. It wasn't a common event for all of them to be home for supper together and Sims was going about getting something together. Since it was the day after Thanksgiving, leftovers were to be the menu. Covered dishes in the oven contained sweet and mashed potatoes, creamed onions, and dressing. On the stove, green vegetables were steaming. He had stripped the turkey and was in the process of making fresh gravy. The goal was to use everything up before the family had a chance to tire of it. The trick was to prepare to plan the initial quantities in the right proportions to effect that end. After this evening, there would be just enough turkey left for sandwiches in Sims lunch tomorrow. Perfect planning.

  He was browning flour in the pan when his wife came through the door. "Perfect timing," he said. "Ready to eat in ten minutes."

  "The cooking cop, John Sims," she greeted him and pecked him on the lips. She shed her coat and hung it in the hall closet. "How was your day?" she asked from there.

  Sims added chicken stock to his mix, stirring with a wire whisk. "Well, my principle case is still wide open, with undertones that are making me uncomfortable. Frankly, I feel like I'm walking down a dead end street."

  June returned and kicked off her shoes in a corner. She sniffed at the pan. "Add a little soy and some herbes de provence. He gave her a look that told her to butt out. She backed away, holding her hands up in defense. "You want to talk about it?"

  "The gravy? No. My day? Later. How was your day?" The broth was incorporated in the mix and he added the soy and herbs.

  June poured them both a glass from the half-bottle of zinfandel left from the day before. "My day had two points of particular interest," she answered and took a sip from her glass. She began to set the table for four. "One: I closed on the Stedler place this morning, and deposited a nice fat commission check in the bank." She held up her glass in a toast to herself. "And two: Word is that Charles Adams showed up with a check at the bank this morning, also. No, wait. It was a wire transfer." She left the statement hanging.

  Sims turned down the heat under the bubbling pan and turned to face her, picking up his wineglass from the counter. "And?" he asked.

  His wife smiled at him. "And," she said, "it was for a million-two, drawn on a bank in the Cayman Islands. Pretty mysterious, huh?" She swirled the wine in her glass and took a sip. "He also showed up with the deeds to all his property, including his residence, for security. Wonder how Letty feels about that?"

  Sims grew thoughtful. He felt that it somehow connected to the morass he'd been swimming in all week, but he couldn't say how or why he felt that way. When otherwise disconnected but coincidental pieces of information floated together, he tended, like Clarkson, to let them stew together on the right side of his brain. Sometimes they made a gravy to serve over a case and pull it together, and sometimes they went into the trash with the bones. But this was Friday night, the kids were home for a few hours at least, and tomorrow was another day.

  .

  Louis was growing fretful. He had talked to Joey's lawyer and learned that Joey was on the street again, for which he was thankful, but no lights had come on in Joey's house since his release and he hadn't heard from him. This made him nervous. Also, even though Louis was paying his fee, Daniel Drew refused to give him any specifics about the case, pleading client confidentiality. Louis was staying off the phone, not wanting it to give out a busy signal in case Joey should call.

  He was pacing in the kitchen, wondering what was happening, when the front doorbell rang. It would be unlike Joey to come to the front door and ring the bell, but his hopefulness led him to think it might be him, coming to set his mind at rest. He strode through the unlit front room to the door and flung it open. On the other side, wonder of wonders, was Old Joe Soucup himself, come to call.

  Joe had on a green, quilted nylon jacket, frayed at the elastic cuffs and stained from long use without washing. His baggy, brown wool pants were tucked into unbuckled, black rubber boots, which brimmed with snow, evidently from trudging through the snow of his un-shoveled front walk. His chicken-like neck moved like a spoon in a teacup as he peered around Louis into the unlit front room. He looked as though he expected Louis to invite him in.

  Louis glanced down at the boots, considering whether to ask Joe to walk around to the rear door. Joe preempted him by stepping in and around him to head for the lighted area of the kitchen. Louis followed behind, picking clumps of snow from the carpet before they could melt. Neither man had said a word of greeting. Their relationship thus far as neighbors had been one of mutual antagonism, buffered by the position of Joey between them. Louis suspected Joe of racism, thought he might be some sort of damn Nazi, but the reality was that of a generalized misanthropy. Joe discriminated not on the basis of race, creed, religion, or national origin. He was absolutely democratic in his cynicism, mistrusting all equally. Excepting perhaps Joey, who still shoveled his walk for a dollar-an-hour.

  Joe settled himself in a chair at the table, grinning slightly at Louis dumping the slushy remnants of his passage into the sink. Louis caught him at it, scowling in return. He had enough on his mind without a visit from his closest enemy. Louis leaned back against the sink counter, crossing his arms over his chest. Let the old bastard speak first, he was damned if he was going to make small talk to draw out the reason for this visit.

  "Nice slippers," said Joe, still with that maddening grin on his face.

  Louis almost looked down at his brown leather slippers, shinning with recent polish. "What exactly do you want, old man?" he asked instead.

  Directly, Joe answered. "Where's Joey?" he asked, as though Louis might be hiding him in the basement. Joe screwed the earpieces of his hearing aids into place.

  "Haven't the slightest idea," Louis answered. "What's the matter, didn't get your walk shoveled? Looking for someone to take you to the supermarket? Or are you just being the miserable old prick that you are."

  Joe responded by making himself comfortable, shucking his coat to hang backwards over his chair and rolling the sleeves of his ancient red flannel shirt over his elbows. The fabric of the shirt was so worn, Louis could discern the lines of a sleeveless white undershirt. Louis was surprised to note a faint blue tattoo of numbers on the inside of Joe's forearm.

  Silence grew in the room like a dull shadow, making the light in the kitchen seem inadequate. Louis was about to break it by ordering Joe out, but the old man spoke first. "I'm worried for Joey," he said, the grin fading from his face.

  Louis wasn't totally disar
med by this comment, but he relaxed his guard enough to sit opposite old Joe at the table. A shared concern for their mutual neighbor was enough to call a temporary truce between them. Louis was able to open a bit. "I've been a little worried, myself," he allowed.

  "I been watching the cops crawling around all week," Joe said, his accent more pronounced than usual. "And the t.v., when I can get it to work. I don't trust the sons-of-bitches, none of them. I think they're going to screw the boy." Joe dug in his pocket and pulled out a pouch of chewing tobacco.

  "Don't do that here," Louis said.

  "Huh?"

  "Don't chew that shit here." Joe narrowed his eyes at him. "Please," Louis added reluctantly. He could picture the old man leaking brown juice in his kitchen. Joe took the 'please' as a minor victory and returned the pouch to his pocket without loading his cheek.

  Louis shared Joe's concern for Joey, but not his paranoia about the police and the media. "Well," he began, "I suppose the news people aren't going to help Joey out at all, but I don't think they'll do him much harm, either. It's not that big a story and they'll disappear as soon as it's over. As for the police, well, they have to be the ones to figure it all out, catch the guy who shot Joey. That's the only way." Louis leaned back and laced his fingers together over his stomach. He bore the look of a man with superior knowledge of how the world operated. He thought that Joe's expression was close to a sneer, though it may have been the natural set of his features. But the old man was reaching for his chew again. It was about time for him to leave, Louis decided.

  Joe preempted him. "Maybe you're stupid, and maybe not. Maybe you're just ignorant." Joe had a golf-ball sized lump of tobacco in the hand that he was waving at Louis and shreds were coming loose and flecking the table top. He paused to shove the plug into his mouth. He continued speaking before Louis could find words to reply. "I got something to tell you. If you can't understand it, then you're a fool, too." The tobacco in his mouth was still dry, and small pieces accompanied the words from his mouth.

  "I'll tell you who the fool is, old man, and‐"

  "Hold on," Joe interrupted, "I ain't done yet. Just listen for a minute, before you start yappin'." He glared at Louis, daring him to say something.

  Louis was simmering. He glared back at Joe, refusing to let the old man goad him into boiling over. Let him finish what he had to say and then hustle him out before he worked up enough saliva to spit somewhere. And if he did, then Louis would wipe it up with the skinny old bastard and toss the whole mess into the snow outside.

  Old Joe Soucup could read Louis' mind, and he almost grinned. Instead, he went on. "When I say the cops were creeping around, I mean they were creeping around Monday night, too." He paused to let his words sink in. "It was a cop I saw in Joey's backyard that night. It was a cop that shot him."

  Louis went still. Joe was a crank and a rotten neighbor, but he wasn't a liar. If anything, he was only too willing to call things as he saw them, and to hell with anybody who didn't like it. But he could be mistaken, given his prejudices. "A cop," Louis said.

  "That's right." Joe nodded once.

  "In uniform."

  "Nope, but I seen his picture on the t.v. enough that I know who he is."

  "You could recognize him in the dark."

  Joe nodded once more. "Yup. Almost a full moon. My hearing is for shit, but my eyes are still good."

  Louis paused. "Who?"

  Joe tilted his head back and to the side, while holding Louis' eye. He had the knowledge, the key to the mystery, and he savored it for a moment. But he hadn't come here merely to vex Louis, though that was worthwhile in itself. "It was the Chief of Police, himself. Sloan, that greasy piece of shit."

  Louis knew this was impossible, or improbable to the maximum extent. He also knew Joe, as one could only know an enemy after studying him for decades, and it was clear that Joe was convinced of his observation. It was likely that Joe had seen a man who at least looked like Sloan. And if he believed that the man was the chief of police, that would be reason enough not to confide his sighting to Sims when he had visited the old man.

  "What are you gawking at?" asked Joe. "Didn't you hear me? Maybe you are a fool." Joe snorted and began looking around for a place to unload his accumulation of saliva. His eyes went to the sink.

  "Hold on," Louis said, and got up from his seat to retrieve an empty coffee can from the cabinet under the sink. He removed the plastic lid from the can and set it before Joe, who managed to spit into it without getting more than a drop or two on the table top. Louis grimaced.

  "Look," Joe said, "I don't care what you think about me. The important thing is that Joey has to get the hell out of here before the bastards kill him. I got a few bucks I can give him. You ante up some cash, too, and get him to go somewhere's else where they can't get to him." His eyes bore in on Louis. "I know what I'm talking about. When it's the police that are the bad guys, you got to get out. There's nothing else you can do. They got me once, when I was a kid in '42." He tapped the tattoo on his arm. "I got out with my life, and a lot of others didn't."

  That Joe would share this piece of personal information with him, and was actually willing to part with some of his own money to help Joey flee, was astounding to Louis. The old man had never even been in his home before, nor Louis in his. Louis had to take him seriously. "Okay," he said, "Let's say that the guy you saw was actually Sloan, or at least looked a lot like him." Joe snorted. "If that's the case, I believe there's at least one policeman we can trust to tell it to."

  Joe snorted again. "How do you know the bastards aren't all in it together?"

  "Hey," replied Louis, "You're about ready to die anyway, aren't you? What do you got to lose?"

  .

  The evening temperature had dropped below freezing and Joey had started the Suburban to warm it up for the underdressed Elwood while his sister was putting a gauze bandage over his wound. Elwood was now standing a few feet away from the vehicle in his flip-flops and tee-shirt, holding his foul-smelling black boots away from his body, their tops pinched together between thumb and forefinger. Joey opened the rear door for Elwood to put them on the shower curtain in the back.

  "Ain't this the lesbo-mobile?" asked Elwood. "Ha. Do they know who you're driving around in it?"

  "It's Doris' and Emily's, yes," answered Joey, "and no, I didn't mention you." Joey shut the rear and got into the driver's seat. Elwood followed suit on the passenger side.

  "Wouldn't they shit if they knew," Elwood said. "Breakfast with Butch would be all over for you, that's for sure." He laughed at his own joke. It was just this kind of talk that had caused Elwood to be excommunicated from Emily's Rest for life. Doris had gotten fed up with his loud comments one day and had hauled him out to the street by his upper lip. Even after a year had passed, the scene was hauled out to be rehashed at Molly's whenever Elwood appeared. He appeared to be as amused as everyone else by the retelling.

  Joey frowned. "I don't plan to bring it up with them." He turned to Elwood. "I'd appreciate it if you didn't, either."

  "Shit, I'm not going to be telling nobody nothing. I'm gonna get my gear together and head out south on my bike, tonight."

  The Chevy still idled in the driveway. Joey was digesting the fact that any information he could get from Elwood would have to be received this evening, or not at all. "Alright, Woody, tell me how I got tied up in this."

  "Drive, man. Take the back way. I'll talk on the way." Elwood manipulated the heater controls to blow hot air on his toes as Joey backed onto the street and began the journey to Elwood's apartment, five miles to the southwest corner of Rock Harbor.

  Woody began his narration with the shouting scene at the Lion's Club, pausing in his tale to slide down in his seat whenever a car's headlights appeared ahead of them on the road. "You shoulda seen your face," he said, "when Adams started chewing you out. Mouth open, beet red face with lines on it like a checkerboard. That scene was funny at the time, but I'll tell you, if I knew what was gonna ha
ppen with you later, I woulda cold-cocked that runty son-of-a-bitch right there. I'm sorry about that, man. You gotta know I had nothing to do with that."

  Joey interrupted. "You're talking about Sloan? Sloan shot me?" Incredulity was in his voice and expression.

  "That's right. We were meeting there to go over the schedule for the deal. Adams and Sloan thought you were listening in on the conversation. Adams freaked and Sloan said he'd take care of it. I thought he might warn you off or something, but I never thought he was gonna try and kill you. Stupid of me I guess, not to see who would be next on his list."

  "He's the one that shot you, too?" Joey took his eyes off the road to ask this and the Suburban veered across the road into the other lane. Elwood put his hand on the wheel and jerked them back to their own side. No other vehicles were in sight.

  "Watch where you're goin', man. That's right, Harry Sloan, pillar of the community, tried to kill us both. Just goes to show, asshole can't do anything right the first time." Elwood paused, watching the road. "I ain't gonna give him a second chance, though, and you better watch your ass, too."

  "Anyway," Elwood continued, "not that the details are something you gotta know, but Adams and Sloan are together in this deal to make some big money. Somehow, and I don't have any idea how, they came up with a source of cocaine and heroin in quantity and used me for a go-between to unload the stuff through some people I know in Portland. Serious weight, man. Coupla kilos of fine Colombian flake and fifty kilos of pure, high-grade smack from Afghanistan, or somewhere like that. Enough dope to kill a million junkies.

  "My piece was supposed to be ten large for a coupla days work. Set it up, keep the parties separate, make the delivery. Shoulda known I was the piece that had to be eliminated to erase the connection. Stupid me. Keep your speed up, you're going about ten miles an hour."

  Joey was distracted from his driving, his mind reeling from Elwood's deadpan delivery of a tale so foreign to Joey's non-fiction life. He read this stuff; he didn't want to live it. He felt like he'd been drawn through the cover into one of the books on his bookshelves. He pulled himself back to the job at hand, glancing at the speedometer and increasing his speed to what he thought should be reasonable for this dark, rural, back road. The trees slid by, still rimed with the icy remnants of the storm. They passed unpaved driveways and fire-roads and houses set back from the roadway, some lit, others awaiting the return of the families that, presumably, inhabited them. In any other week past, he would have felt some connection to this world. Now, they seemed screened from him, as though a gauze curtain had been drawn between his life and theirs, and the edge of the curtain was hidden from him. "Sorry," he said, "Go on."

  Woody watched him for a minute, wondering if he should offer to drive, though his right arm was throbbing with pain, each beat of his heart sending a jolt down to his fingertips. He'd better save all his strength for the ride ahead of him, he thought. He wanted to put several hundred miles between him and the trouble in Rock Harbor before allowing himself a good sleep.

  "I did the deal," Elwood said. "Scary bastards on the other end. Dress in nice suits and wear big gold rings with diamonds and shit, but you know, looking in their eyes, they're as bad as bad gets. I did it straight, not trying to work any angles into it to cut myself a bigger piece. No room to fuck around with these guys." He shook his head, clearing them from his vision. I did it straight and delivered the goods on Monday night. Drove down in a rental, left a black trunk full of dope and an envelope with a black guy in a van in a parking lot in the middle of town, and came home, job done. Guy never said a word to me. Didn't help me lug that trunk into the back of his van, neither. Just watched me until I drove away."

  "What was in the envelope?"

  "Dunno. Probably an account number or something. That kind of money, nobody deals in cash, just check the quality and the weight and wire the money through enough banks so's it gets lost in all the other money flying around, here to there and everywhere. That's how they do it in the big time deals. Nobody has to get their hands dirty counting out dollar bills, just tap it out on a clean, white keyboard. It's only people like me and you, got to get down into the dirt, come out smelling like shit. If we come out at all." Elwood haw-hawed.

  Joey didn't laugh with him. He was trying to put everything in order, find some way to reconcile all the bits and pieces so that he might be able to put his life back together. "So Sloan and Adams got ahold of some dope, got you to unload it, shot the both of us to keep it secret, and what? Why'd they need to do it? What's the point?"

  Elwood haw-hawed at Joey until he had to grab hold of his shaking shoulder to stop its movement and ease the pain. "You are one stupid son-of-a-bitch," he said. "You don't know a gawd-damned thing about people and money and power. How could you live so long and not have a clue?" He shook his head. "Never mind. It don't matter. Don't miss the turn up ahead, on the right."

  Joey might have missed the turn, but Elwood's prompt caused him to slow and turn into an early-fifties' era development, hastily thrown up for the benefit of returned veterans of the Korean conflict and the prior world war. The vets had escaped the shoddy project as quickly as they became able to, and it became just another low-rent district of poorly insulated duplex apartments, forty double units that should have been torn down before they were occupied. The Housing Authority had plowed the short driveways clear and Joey parked in Elwood's space beside a unit painted a faded and peeling red. "Where's your bike?" he asked. "It isn't here?"

  "It's here. You don't think I'm gonna park it where some scummy little kids are gonna climb all over it, do you?" And indeed it was there, as Joey discovered when they entered the front door and Elwood flicked on the overhead light. It sat upon its kickstand in the center of the small living room, over a greasy stain on the long-ago varnished, yellow pine floor. Pieces of drive chain, a wheel rim with bent spokes, and various other bike parts decorated the room, scattered and clumped like the toys in the room of a particularly messy child, a child who drank a lot of beer in cans. The Harley, itself, was polished and gleaming, flawless in black and chrome. The only furniture in the room consisted of a defunct and grease-stained, under-stuffed, brown corduroy couch and a console television set/workbench that was elevated a foot above floor level, apparently to provide a better working height, on stacks of red bricks.

  "Have a seat," Elwood offered. "I'm gonna get some clothes on and some gear. I want to head on out before anybody knows I been here." He headed immediately up the stairway, threading his way around the obstacles that dotted its treads. Joey followed him up. The detritus on the stairs may have been overflow from the bedroom and bath that comprised the second floor space allotment. There was a kingsize mattress in the bedroom, sheet-less, and strewn with crumpled clothing and blankets. It may or may not have had a pillow to go with it, hidden among the clothing and trash that covered both mattress and floor space. There may even have been a rug beneath, but it would have been redundant. The smell in the room was reminiscent of that of Molly's, minus the mothballs, but with an overlay of petroleum products.

  Elwood stripped unselfconsciously, and began excavating for wearing apparel. He came up with a set of red flannel long-johns, the kind that were all of a piece, with a drop seat. He found jeans, a blue, hooded sweatshirt, and a black, insulated, nylon parka with a section of sleeve that had melted and fused in an odd pattern. He donned what he had found so far, lest it be lost again to chaos.

  Joey waited until the long-johns were settled to Elwood's oversized contours before asking his next question. "How did you get shot?"

  Elwood spoke while continuing his task at hand. "Friday early, about three o'clock, I was supposed to meet Sloan and Adams at the cannery. By that time, they would know whether the payment had come through and I could get my end. They knew I was leaving town right after, but either that wasn't enough to keep me quiet, or they just didn't want to let go of that little piece of the action. Probably both.

  "The side door to the c
annery floor was wide open, so I walked in and saw Adams, dressed like some old lobsterman, rubber boots on his feet and everything, standing in the middle of that big, empty floor. There was enough moonlight coming in that I could see he was holding a white envelope in his hand, slapping it on his thigh. I focused in on that envelope and walked right up to him like a fool, never looking around to see if anyone else was standing in the shadows. Son-of-a-bitch Sloan stepped out and showed me a piece, thirty-eight revolver. That's when I knew I was going down."

  Joey stood just inside the doorway, having shuffled his feet down to the actual floor and unwilling to tread any further on what lay beyond. Elwood rooted around some more and came up with a hightop, leather construction boot, sans lace. He paused in his search for a mate and offered an observation. "You know," he said, "We must have been shot with the same gun. That makes us like blood-brothers, or something. What do you think of that?" He chuckled.

  "That's great, Woody. What happened next?" Joey's sense of humor wasn't as highly developed as Elwood's. He spotted the other boot in an opposite corner and pointed it out to Elwood.

  "What happened next was I told them what I thought of them as humans, or non-humans, and tried not to shit my pants. I think I might have hurt Adams' feeling a little, but Sloan just waved me outside to the dock with his gun and followed right behind me. Adams watched from inside, the pussy." Elwood found a black leather bomber hat, and pulled it on, earflaps down.

  "Sloan had a Whaler tied to the dock. He got in first, holding that gun on me while he backed down to the dock on the ramp. Low tide, steep ramp. I was hoping the asshole would trip and fall off into the water, but he didn't, and when I climbed down into the bow, I saw the cement block and the rope that was tied to it. I think I might have actually shit myself a little bit then, I'm not sure. But he made me tie that rope on my ankle and when he pushed the Whaler away from the dock, I knew for sure that my time was up. He was gonna bring me out into deep water and disappear me."

  Elwood lifted a corner of the mattress and removed a small stack of bills, which he counted and shoved into the sole rear pocket of his jeans, and a small, black, semi-automatic pistol, which he placed in a side pocket of his parka. He zipped the pocket closed. He plucked a few more items of clothing from the jumble on the floor for alternate wear, but underwear did not seem to be a necessary part of his ensemble. Satisfied with what he had found, he clutched the laundry to his chest under his good arm and pushed past Joey to return downstairs.

  Joey caught up to him as he stuffed his assemblage into a pair of black, fringed and studded saddlebags hanging from the back of his bike. "So how'd you get from there to the dumpster?" he asked.

  "Help me push this mother outside, willya?" Elwood asked. Joey assisted from the right side and together they balanced it off the kickstand and guided it through the kitchen. Elwood talked while they were moving. "There was a light moving on the water. Patrol boat finding its way back to the pier, I guess. I was sitting with that cement block on my lap, looking at it like it was gonna talk to me or something, show me a way out. Sloan and me both looked up at the light and I took my chance." Elwood left Joey to balance the bike while he opened the back door. A piece of plywood ran down the center of the three concrete steps to ground level. Elwood balanced the bike while Joey acted as a brake, holding back from the rear end of the seat and straddling the plywood strip, and the heavy machine pulled them both down into the soft snow lying below. The door was left open behind them.

  Elwood spoke between grunts as they forced their way through the snow to the clear pavement beyond. "I stood up to jump in the water. Ugh. Holding that stupid block. Ugh. Sloan shot me while I was in the air. Rrgh. Splash, and I was under. Ugh. I could hear that big Merc start up as the block dragged me to the bottom, and the whine when he took off. I had a knife clipped on my pants and got it open and cut that fucking rope. Shucked off my jacket, son-of-a-bitch nice leather jacket, lost my knife, son-of-a-bitch nice knife, and floated up after the other boat went by. Damn, my lungs were bursting. I paddled, half a dog paddle, you know, under the pilings to the shore and made it up the street into the dumpster. And there you found me and that's all she wrote."

  Joey balanced the bike as Elwood straddled it. "You gonna be all right?" he asked. "How are you gonna drive it with one arm?"

  "I'll make it. I want to get a long ways tonight before I sleep, but I'll make it okay." He jumped on the crank and the engine roared to life. With his left, he guided his stiff right arm to grasp the handlebar. "You know," he said, "if you promise to shoot those two assholes, I'll leave you my piece."

  Joey blinked. "No. I don't think I could do that."

  "Alright, man. But I'm gonna come back someday, after I heal up and things cool down. And when they least expect it, I'm gonna pay it all back. In fact, once I get far enough away, I think I might just give old Charlie a call, let him know I'm all right." Elwood goosed the engine and lights went on in the house next door. "Don't let them kill you, Joey," he yelled, and rolled into the roadway, accelerating after he was straightened out to the direction of travel.

  Joey said good-bye, too, but his farewell was lost beneath the roar. He quietly got in the Suburban and drove away before his presence was noted by the neighbors. He drove randomly, thinking about what he had heard and trying to fit it in with some reasonable course of action that would bring his life back on track and maintain his safety. He couldn't imagine taking this wild tale of conspiracy to the authorities and having them give credence to it. After all, both Sloan and Adams were respected men in the community and he was a man who had built a life using an assumed identity. His only witness was an outlaw on the run, unavailable in any case. He wondered whether he would be more,or less, in danger of losing his life by coming forward with his dubious story. Either way, he had to assume that his safety could not be taken for granted.

  After hours of aimless driving, the gas gauge was down to an eighth of a tank and he would have to park it or fill it soon. Joey drove with his window down, attempting to air out the vehicle, but the smell of Molly's dumpster persisted, despite the volumes of cold, fresh air passing through it. "Shit," he said aloud, "Woody's boots." The boots had pickled in the foul soup at the bottom of the dumpster for several hours, time enough to alter their character forever. Picturing them in his mind, reeking, sitting on the plastic shower curtain behind him, they began to annoy him. They became a focal point for his frustration and inability to find a remedy for his situation.

  Though Sloan and Adams had tried to kill him and had caused his secrets to come out into the open, and Woody had been a part of their corrupt scheme, his growing anger didn't settle upon them. He had never been able to be angry at the many people close to him who had deserted him through death, so it may not have been surprising that he misdirected his anger now. He stopped at a filling station on the edge of town and filled the tank, glaring through the glass at the sodden black boots in the back with their ridiculous chain straps. Filling the tank left him with three dollars and change. He bought a coffee and a candy bar, reducing his means by another dollar and a half. Driving toward the center of town, he found that the odor from the back spoiled the taste of his coffee and candy. He emptied the cup onto the road and put it and the rest of his bar on the floor. Another reason to despise those boots. Then he had an idea, probably no worse an idea than some others he had had during the past week.

  Instead of stopping and parking the big Chevy in its alley spot next to Emily's, he continued through town to the northeast end and the lone, paved road that led down to the flats. It was approaching three a.m. and he hadn't passed a single occupied vehicle on his way through town. Chubb's Creek Road ran three-quarter's of a mile to a small paved parking area and boat ramp on a tidal creek of the same name. Small boats on trailers could gain access to the water there on all but the lowest of low tides. And from there, clammers had easy access to the broad flats of gooey stuff that was home to their shelled quarry. Baylor Road split
left from Chubb's Creek about a hundred yards before the parking area and continued past a defunct bait shop and two or three graveled driveways to dead-end by a high-gabled, gray shingled Cape Cod-style house. The house belonged to Chief Harry A. Sloan and Joey approached to within a hundred yards of it with his lights off and stopped.

  Joey sat in the idling Chevy with the windows down and watched the house. He could see the unmarked department-owned Chrysler parked beside it over the expanse of beach rose that dominated the landscape here. A moderate breeze, enough to rattle the ice-covered bushes, blew through the open windows, bringing some freshness and the unique aroma of the flats to Joey's nostrils. The house seemed to be entirely asleep.

  Joey got out of the vehicle, pushing the door closed quietly with his hip and opened the rear door. He narrowed his eyes at the sight of the offending boots and bundled them up in the shower curtain, careful not to come in contact with them. He walked slowly and cautiously with his parcel to the wooden steps of the house and set it upon the landing there, laying the plastic open so that the boots faced the door neatly, side-by-side. He backed away from them, admiring his gift. "There you go," he said quietly, "try 'em on, see how they fit." Then he turned and strode back to his ride, glancing over his shoulder as he went. He backed away from the scene, turning in the first driveway before switching on his headlights. Not until that time did he wonder if his action had been one more ill-considered move.

 

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