Kennis sighed. “Of course you did.”
“Nasty little prick. He got suspended for spraying a Star of David on Vicky Fleishman’s locker. I bet he had something to do with this shit show, too.”
Kennis frowned. “I’ll be talking to him. As soon as I get back to the station.”
“Good. You know his pedigree, though, Chief. So be careful.”
“Sometimes being careful is the worst possible tactic, Billy. You proved that today—you and your friend.”
Billy made a weighing-the-scales gesture, seesawing his two open palms. “Town politics? Kid with a gun? I don’t know.”
Kennis smiled. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Billy liked the chief; they had history. The man had taken his side when Billy was falsely accused of a series of bombings a few years before. Kennis was a straight shooter, but he was an off-islander. He didn’t really understand Nantucket, and he probably never would. Getting Hamilton Tyler off the police force would be like pulling an embedded tick from the inside of your ear, tricky and painful—and you couldn’t do it alone. But you couldn’t just leave it, either, and let it pump babesiosis and Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis and God-knows-what infections they hadn’t even discovered yet into your body.
Ham Bone, they used to call him. He was poison, but some random, hearsay evidence connecting him to a school shooting wouldn’t dislodge him.
Billy could imagine the conversation:
“Some crazy kid dropped my name? So what? Maybe he hoped I’d stick up for him. Maybe he thinks I have some grudge against Delavane. The guy’s an asshole, but I couldn’t care less. I’ve talked to him, like, twice since high school. He thinks my uncle messed with him on some DUI twenty years ago, that could be it, though how that Contrell kid knows about it, you got me. Maybe they’re pals. Maybe Delavane put him up to the shooting. Fuck do I know? His brother’s in the slammer for life, the dad was a nut job, so who knows? This shit runs in the family. DNA is destiny, man. Science proves it.”
No, to take down Ham Bone Tyler, they were going to need real evidence, facts he couldn’t argue his way out of. And nobody was going to snoop around trying to find it. Boner—another nickname, derived from the first—hadn’t committed any crimes yet, and if he was planning to do so, that wasn’t police business. The police showed up after the fact. No knock on them; that was their job. And it made sense. You start arresting people for what you think they’re planning to do, you might as well starting building the Gulag.
Billy understood that.
If anyone was going to investigate Ham Bone, it would have to be a regular person, working on their own. You could hire a detective—there was a good one on the island now—but Billy had the native islander’s hatred for spending money, especially giving it to someone else for a job you could easily do yourself. You rewired your own lamps, changed your own oil, snaked your own toilets. That was common sense. That self-reliant Quaker practicality explained why Billy Delavane, without mentioning it to anyone, even Mitch Stone, and especially not to the police chief, started following Ham Tyler the next morning.
He called in sick, but he didn’t fool Pat Folger. The wiry old contractor had launched his own adventures into vigilantism a few years before, when his son got hooked on opioids.
“Do what you have to do, kid,” Pat told him. “Just stay safe.”
Ham was easy to follow, it turned out, lodged firmly in his own world, no doubt starring in his own cable-ready movie—Ham Tyler: Crime Patrol, perhaps, or just Danger Cop. He cruised the island, pulled people over for minor infractions, mostly Hispanic people, disappeared into the new fortress police station for paperwork or a quick workout—then back home to his family’s paint-peeling ruin of a house in Tom Nevers. Billy owned quite a few properties in similar condition, though set in far better locations—Eel Point Road, Polpis Harbor, Long Pond, Squam—and he grudgingly admired Ham for not selling out and collecting the million or so dollars his crumbling homestead could have reaped in the island’s overheated real estate market. Billy occasionally sold an acre here or there, himself, to pay the taxes on the rest of his family’s holdings. He had donated some harbor beachfront to the Land Bank, but that was it. Real islanders held on, at least until the next generation cashed out. He thought of the Larrabee place in Cisco—a hoarder’s labyrinth of broken cars and trucks, piled tires and leaking carburetors strewn about in the weeds—the acres of automotive rubble now cleared for one more multimillion-dollar subdivision. The Larrabee property had always been slightly disturbing, but it was old Nantucket, a rusting kingdom of objects saved for the moment they might be needed on a scrap of sand too far away from the rest of America to allow the luxury of relying on mainland strangers. The Larrabees’ property was an oddball remnant of Billy’s childhood, and he hated to lose it. So, good for you, Ham Bone. Hang in there. Replace a few windowsills and repair that roof so your kids can afford to live here, if you ever have any.
Billy sat in his truck and estimated the renovation costs for the Tyler house. He worked out the dimensions of a stairway he was supposed to be building for Pat Folger, and in the course of that solitary week, he learned one of the primary, inescapable realities of police work—done correctly, it’s mind-numbingly tedious. And his mind wasn’t the only body part that started to lose all feeling. He had never sat so long in any vehicle doing nothing, paying attention to an unused driveway or a closed front door. It was like a staring contest with a stuffed deer head, as he had seen his father attempt once in a drunken stupor.
His father blinked first.
But Billy kept his eyes open and peed into a jar and lived on granola bars and bottled water, and three days into the vigil, he finally got his reward.
He had followed Ham from home to the Chicken Box and slipped into the seedy mid-island bar behind his quarry. At five thirty in the afternoon, no one was drinking but the hard-core regulars. John Fogerty sang “Run Through the Jungle” over the chatter of conversation and the clink of pool balls. A silent TV showed guys in suits talking about the new football season.
Billy almost fled. Everyone knew him here. Someone would call out to him, maybe even the bartender, who had done a stint as a plasterer years ago. What was his name? Danny something. He’d been up on those crazy stilts spreading the blue diamond halfway across a forty-foot living room when he paused and told Billy, “This is a little too much like work.”
Well, pulling beers for his old pals had to be easier. As for the fine points of cocktail mixology, he wouldn’t get much demand for that skill set at the Chicken Box.
Billy ducked his head and continued inside. This was crazy. He should have just waited in his car. No one had recognized him yet, but—
Ham paid for his beer and headed toward the bathroom. As he walked, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Going into the bathroom to make a phone call? This could be it.
Danny glanced up and grinned. “Hey—”
Billy threw out a flat palm to silence him. It only bought a second, but that was enough.
“Hey, Billy, what’s goin’ on?”
Ham was already out of sight.
“Later.”
“But—”
“Shhh.”
Billy moved fast, head down. He stopped at the swinging door to the men’s room. Would Ham use a stall? Probably, but, if not—
Billy pushed the door open an inch.
Empty.
But he could hear Ham’s voice behind the metal partition.
Billy slipped inside.
“Anybody there? Hello? No, no, I thought I heard something, that’s all. Yeah? Well, I have a right to be jumpy! This isn’t exactly my thing, all right? Which, I was thinking—you should maybe stick around for a while. You know—after. We could use a guy like you. Like a hired gun.”
Billy moved closer. Anyone could walk in at any time. He needed to get into one of
the stalls, but that was impossible. Ham would hear him and shut the phone call down instantly. No, he had to stand here, play the odds and hope. He breathed shallowly, through his mouth. The tile walls amplified every sound.
Ham went on: “If I learned anything last week, it’s that you can’t do ethnic cleansing with kids and punks and amateurs. Sure, sure, but the Hitler Youth got ’em early, man. You gotta get ’em early. Some sixteen-year-old with a bug up his ass…forget it. And speaking of cleansing—you should see the way these fuckin’ people live. Makes you puke. Anyway, what I’m saying—there’s this surf-bum nail banger doing the neighborhood watch dance, fucking things up. Dude’s been a prick since high school. Oh, yeah, we go way back. Anyway, I was thinking…one well-placed round to the back of the head, and—”
Billy felt an actual chill go down his spine, a trill of fever. His fists were clenching at his sides. He relaxed them and drew in a silent shuddering breath, listening. There were steps outside the door.
They moved on.
“—Okay. Okay, I get it! Be cool. I was just—fine, whatever. I didn’t mean that. No, no, I was just saying—Good, fine, great. Okay. I can handle this asshole myself anyway. What? Don’t sweat it. I took care of that already…what do you care? Anyone can do it. Check it out on YouTube or wikiHow, or who the fuck knows where, anywhere, just go online…yeah, that’s what I’m saying. But, anyway, it’s done. The what? What the fuck is a dactylogram?”
What was a dactylogram? What the hell were they talking about? Billy cursed himself. Why didn’t he have a tape player, or at least a pencil? A carpenter without a pencil! What did Pat always say? “You’re a soldier going into battle without your weapon!” Was the pen really mightier than the sword? Maybe this afternoon it would have been. Billy would just have to remember.
“Jesus, sorry, Einstein. I don’t have a dictionary stuffed up my ass. Okay, okay, so I got it, all right? Don’t worry about that stuff. That’s my end. Okay, whatever, fine—I broke into the house and used a chunk of Play-Doh. What difference does that make? From the school, okay? The elementary school, yeah. I grabbed it when I was in there checking out the new alarm system before the school year. No one was around, don’t worry. I’m telling you, nobody saw shit! Nobody sees shit, that’s the great thing about people. You told me that yourself, remember? That line about Clark Kent fooling ’em with the glasses. And you were right. Anyway…oh, yeah, so I got—what? No, no…well, I thought I heard somebody moving around in the house, but it must have been the wind or something. Or maybe the dog, they have a dog. I was in and out fast. I used the chloroform, like you told me. That spic musta felt like he had a bad night in Tijuana when he woke up next morning. So anyway…you don’t need any fancy equipment. All you do is, you freeze the putty, get a batch of gelatin, nice thick gelatin—you have to microwave it a few times to get the bubbles out. Then you pour it on, refreeze the whole thing, and you’re done. Fuck you! You asked me! Sorry to waste your precious time. Yeah, well, this is the part I care about, okay?”
Billy chanted to himself: Play-Doh, gelatin, chloroform. Play-Doh, gelatin, chloroform. Some Hispanic guy’s house. Someone with a dog. Fuck—everybody had a dog.
Ham was still going: “Do your thing—just make sure that my guy goes down for it. I sent you the picture. She’s gonna be off-island for the day. I checked with the Hy-Line. She has a reservation on the three o’clock fast ferry back. You just follow her off the boat. No, no, no—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. She has an office on North Water Street and the rental house, and sometimes she house-sits for people, too. She could wind up anywhere, and you can’t afford to be waiting around in the wrong place. People notice strangers around here. You got a narrow window and it closes fast. Wait till she’s inside, so you can leave—right, right, sorry. I’m used to dealing with retards around here. You know what to do. Just do it. You’re welcome.” There was a pause. Then: “Asshole.”
They were done. This was the moment!
Billy lunged toward the stalls, unlatched the one next to Ham’s, and pushed in just as the other door opened.
“Who is that?”
Billy lowered his voice. “Unngh.”
“You okay in there?”
“Unngh, yeah.”
“Don’t forget the mercy flush, skipper.”
Then he was gone.
Billy waited ten minutes and then ten minutes more. Ham was shooting pool when Billy finally eased out of the men’s room, across to the door, and outside.
He took a long breath of the chilly night air—autumn was finally coming—skirted the dirt parking lot, and climbed into his truck. He pulled out, cruised into the rotary, and let it fling him like an Olympian’s discus, true and level, due east to Quidnet and the Stone family house, perched above the pond.
He had urgent questions, and only Mitchell Stone could answer them.
The house on Sesachacha Road looked like a museum of the 1970s, with the Danish Modern furniture and fake-wood floor-to-ceiling paneling untouched for decades. The hooked rugs on the scuffed strip oak floors, the glass-top coffee tables, the knotty-pine kitchen cabinets beside the avocado-green refrigerator and rusting four-burner gas stove teetering on the sloping pebble-pattern linoleum, the white-glass dome light fixtures on the cracked plaster ceilings, bought straight from the old Sears outlet store, prized because they were the cheapest ones Bessie Stone could find… It all brought Billy back to his childhood, the days of roaming the island with Mitch and Mike Henderson, building forts in the national forest, surfing the autumn swells, driving battered SUVs on Coatue, raking the first scallops when family fishing season started.
That was a different Nantucket, a smaller Nantucket.
Billy missed it. Fuck it. Nostalgia was like boozing—it felt good, but the next morning nothing was different except you had a wicked hangover. It was like Mitch always said—“People who live in the present stay alive.”
In the present, dirty cops were planning murders with off-island hired guns, and Billy was one of the targets. Who were the others? And why?
Inside the old house, Mitch and his sister, Susie, were cooking dinner, while Ricky worked on his homework at the kitchen table. The food looked good—pan-fried arctic char and new potatoes, mesclun greens and tomatoes from Bartlett’s. Vicky Fleishman was sipping a glass of red wine, supervising. It was good to see them together again. It felt like the old days—except for those early streaks of gray in Vicky’s hair, Susie’s heavy-framed glasses, and Mitch’s proprietary comfort in a kitchen where he had always felt like a hostage or a prisoner. And, of course, the kid. They all had kids now.
The parents were gone, though. The ghosts of Joe and Bessie Stone had been scrubbed away—no more framed paint-by-number watercolors on the wall, and the gun cabinet that used to hold Winchester and Weatherby hunting rifles now housed Susie’s collection of Nicholas Mosse pottery. The fresh coat of pale off-white paint on the kitchen walls made the room seem twice as big as it used to be, and the smell of the pan-seared fish, garlic, and olive oil beat the aromas of canned peas and stale bacon that Billy remembered from the old days.
“Hey, Billy,” Mitch said as he flipped the char. “You want some dinner? We’ve got plenty.”
“There’s beer in the fridge,” Vicky added.
Ricky looked up. “Hey, Mr. Delavane.”
“Hey, hi. No, no—I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just—I need to talk to Mitch for a couple of minutes.”
Mitch picked up a fork and stabbed one of the red potatoes in the pot of boiling water, then turned to Vicky. “We’re five minutes away. Can you take over?”
“Go talk to Billy.” She lifted her head to him. “You sure you won’t stay?”
“I wish I could.”
“You okay, Billy?” Susie asked.
“I’m fine. I’m good. This won’t take long.”
In the living room, Mitch st
ood at the picture window while Billy paced the carpet describing Ham Tyler’s phone call.
When he was done, Mitch sat down in a leather armchair beside the cold fireplace. He pulled his fingertips down over his face and then back across his temples, thinking. Billy took a seat on the matching couch that faced the hearth to wait.
Mitch expelled a long breath. “Okay, first of all, it’s obvious Ham Bone is hooked up with the Contrell kid. They’re up to their asses in some white supremacy bullshit, which is why Ham Bone wants to pin this murder they’re planning on Sebastian Cruz. That’s what the Play-Doh and the gelatin stuff was all about. Making a fake fingerprint. A dactylogram’s a fingerprint, for what it’s worth, if you’re a dumb guy and you want to use a big word to sound smart. All Ham has to do is get Cruz out of the way with no alibi while his hit man takes out the woman. Two birds with one stone. Which is doable, by the way, if the birds are close enough together.” He caught Billy’s confused look. “Killing two birds with one stone. I’m saying it can be done. You bounce the rock off the first one’s beak, like a bank shot in pool.”
He wasn’t sure Mitch was serious, but Billy believed him. If anyone could pull off a crazy trick like that, it was Mitch Stone. “The question is—who’s the woman?”
“Rental house, office in town, house-sitting gigs. Obviously a local. You tell me. I’ve been away for a while. The good news is the hitter obviously has no interest in coming after you. You gotta watch out for Ham Bone, though. But, I mean, you know…Ham Bone.”
“Yeah. So what do I do?”
“Call it in to the cops. Anonymous tip. Stay out of it, but get them the information. Then you’ve done your duty and you’re not involved. And watch your back. More to the point…check your house and your car for drugs. And lock everything. I know that’s not the Nantucket way, but it would be the easiest thing in the world for Ham to plant a bag of weed in your glove compartment, pull you over, and call it in, just like his uncle—remember?”
“Jesus Christ. Toad Tyler. The original state police brownshirt.”
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