by Jon Loomis
Dogfish stuck his head in the door. “Admiring my collection, I see,” he said.
“It’s very impressive,” Lola said. “Do you always just pee off the deck?”
“The world is my toilet,” said Dogfish.
“What happened to your hand?” Coffin said.
Dogfish looked down. “I slammed it in a door,” he said. “While I was stoned.”
“How’s business?”
“Oh, you know. Slow. The gay guys are all into crystal meth now. It’s crap, but it’s cheap and it’ll keep you going all night—in more ways than one. Nobody cares about a quality high anymore.” Dogfish busied himself starting a small fire in the potbellied stove. “I’m gonna make some coffee if you want some,” he said. “Just take a few minutes.”
“Not for me,” Lola said, eyeing Dogfish’s rusty coffeepot.
“No, thanks,” Coffin said. “What about Jason Duarte? He a customer of yours?”
“Off and on,” Dogfish said, striking a kitchen match and lighting the newspaper he’d wadded carefully into the stove. “Usually when he was broke, ’cause he knew I’d sell to him on credit. I had a good supply of A-grade Burmese that wasn’t super expensive—good clean stuff.” Dogfish looked at his bandaged hand, then looked down at the plywood deck. “But then he got flush all of a sudden and started buying this Afghani flake from some Cape Verdeans out of Fall River. He gave me a hit once. That shit was dangerous.”
“Dangerous how?”
Dogfish looked up, met Coffin’s eyes. “Very, very pure and extremely potent. You know, the Afghani poppy was almost wiped out under the Taliban. Now the market’s flooded with incredibly cheap, incredibly high-grade stuff, thanks to the CIA and the Afghan warlords. George W. Bush, making the world a safer place. To shoot up in.”
“Did Jason ever deal?”
Dogfish looked at his hand, looked down. “Some. I don’t know. Sure. He’d sell a little bit to friends or something, just to help cover his costs.”
“Enough to rile the Cape Verdeans? Or the Jamaicans?”
Dogfish frowned, tilting his head. “Jamaicans? What Jamaicans? There are no Jamaicans moving heroin out here.”
“The Cape Verdeans, then.”
“Maybe,” Dogfish said. “They’re some crazy motherfuckers.”
“They have any trouble with you?”
“Me? Nah. I’m small beans. Hardly a blip on the radar. The Cape Verdeans are mostly trying to expand along the I-95 corridor. They wouldn’t give a fuck about P’town, unless something big was going down.”
“But you said Jason was only selling to a few friends.”
“Yeah, well,” Dogfish said, blowing into the woodstove, then shutting the little door. “That was the old Jason. He changed a lot in the last six months or so. Suddenly he had money, man. Wads of it.”
“Must be hard, shooting up with just one hand,” Coffin said.
“It ain’t easy,” Dogfish said, looking at the bulky, pink bandage. “If you were an amputee or something, I don’t know how you’d do it.”
“What kind of door did you say it got slammed in?” Coffin said. “Pickup truck, by any chance?”
“No, man,” Dogfish said, putting the coffeepot down with a sharp little clang. “That’s just wrong.” He held up his bandaged hand. “Rudy had nothing to do with this.”
Coffin and Lola both stared at him.
“Oh, fuck me,” Dogfish said.
_______
“So,” Lola said, when they were back on the Coast Guard wharf. “Why would your Uncle Rudy slam Dogfish’s hand in a door?”
Coffin’s stomach was still churning. “Rudy wants me to think Duarte was killed by Cape Verdeans,” he said.
“Why?” Lola said.
Coffin bent over, elbows on knees. “I’m not sure,” he said. “To keep me busy for a little while. It’s a diversion.”
“You all right, Frank?”
Coffin took a deep breath, straightened up. “Well, I’m not going to barf. God, I hate boats.”
“Diversion from what?”
Coffin thought for a minute. “I don’t know. From whatever we’re getting too close to.”
Lola laughed. “You’re kidding,” she said. “Right?”
Chapter 17
She’ll run, for now,” Sal said, slamming the Dodge’s hood, “but I can’t make any guarantees as to how long.”
“What’s the damage?”
“Well, I gave her a tune-up. She needed that real bad, Frank. I replaced the fuel pump, which was just barely working—that’s why she was stalling out going uphill. I changed the oil and filters, which was all real nasty. But I gotta tell you, we’re just rearranging the deck chairs here.”
“Bad?”
“Terrible. Your brakes are shot, your tires are bald, your shocks are a joke, she burns oil like crazy, and your head gasket leaks.”
“Anything else?”
“The valves are bent, the rings are worn, your wheel bearings are about to seize, the front end’s dangerously out of whack, the frame is bent, and your radiator’s full of gunk. And you got a nest of field mice in your trunk. You’re basically a danger to yourself and others every time you start this thing.”
“So what do I owe you?”
“Well, the fuel pump’s a rebuilt—I’ll give you the plugs, wires, oil, and filters at cost. No charge for labor. Let’s say a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. This way, I call the cops, I figure you’ll at least show up.”
“What, are you worried?”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Sal said, picking his teeth with a blunt thumbnail. “Knowing what I know?”
Jamie’s advanced class hadn’t gone well. She’d felt flustered and out of sorts; she hoped her students hadn’t noticed. Every time she looked at Duffy Plotz, her skin crawled. She couldn’t help thinking of the three gleaming razor blades in their white envelope.
The students filed out in chattering twos and threes until only Plotz was left, standing in the doorway. Jamie groaned inwardly. Now what? she thought.
Plotz smiled with closed lips, then stuck out his tongue. It was long and purple, almost like a dog’s. A double-edged razor blade lay on its meaty flat, glistening wetly. Plotz reeled in his tongue and the blade disappeared. He smiled again, turned, and walked out.
The dump was closed, the sandy parking lot deserted. Coffin knocked on the door of Plotz’s trailer, but he knew there was no one inside. The day had turned hazy and a little humid; there was hardly any wind in the scrub pines. Several gulls argued over some delicacy that lay in the dirt outside the corrugated shed.
“Let’s try his apartment,” Coffin said, lowering himself into Lola’s Camaro.
“He might have left town,” Lola said, pulling onto Route 6 and accelerating.
“That would be the smart thing to do,” Coffin said. “So I’m guessing he’s still around.”
Lola passed a slow-moving Winnebago. “Poor Jamie. What a creepy thing.”
“She’s okay. Tougher than she looks.”
“If you say so. I’d be freaked,” Lola said. “Maybe she should move in with you for a few days, just to be on the safe side?”
“I suggested that, and she said I was being patronizing, thank you very much. She says she can handle Plotz.”
Plotz lived on Duck Lane, on the far east end. The narrow road was paved with crushed oyster shells. They crunched under Coffin’s feet as he stepped out of the Camaro. A cat watched him from the window of a tiny cottage. Coffin made a kissing sound, and the cat blinked its orange eyes.
Plotz’s building was an old rooming house that had been condo-ized: a narrow, rambling structure shingled in weathered cedar shakes. His apartment was at the top of a ramshackle flight of wooden stairs, which appeared to tilt a few degrees to the left. Coffin knocked on the door, but no one answered.
“Duffy,” he said, “open up!”
No lights were on inside; except for t
he wind, everything was quiet. The sun was going down, and the sky over the harbor was streaked in crimson. The whole town seemed to be glowing—pale magenta, suffused and throbbing.
Coffin clambered back down the stairs and lowered himself into Lola’s car. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe Plotz is smarter than I think. Maybe he did leave town.”
Serena Hench’s cell phone rang while she was having dinner and cocktails at La Bistro with an extremely wealthy client who, thank God, was also extremely gay, which meant she wouldn’t have to sleep with him. Ordinarily she liked it when her cell phone rang in public—she’d become quite the mover and shaker in Provincetown’s soaring real estate market, and she didn’t mind who knew it—but now it was annoying. She had spent the better part of a week wooing this man, a potential investor who now, over his third martini, seemed about to say yes, yes, he would like very much to put up three or four million to help begin the construction of her next big condo project. For Serena, the first rule of business was never, ever take risks with your own money.
She flipped open the tiny silver cell phone and said, “Serena. Talk.”
“Miz Hench?” said a gruff male voice, followed by a surge of static. Cell phone reception in Provincetown was always hit-or-miss; the nearest tower was in Truro, almost ten miles away.
“Yes?” she said. “Who is this?”
“This is Dan Roby, over at the Moors,” said the voice.
Serena’s heart tightened. The Moors was her biggest project to date, a thirty-unit, high-end condo development that would net her millions, if it ever got built. So far the construction had been plagued by one fiasco after another.
She put her hand over the cell phone’s miniature mouthpiece. “Excuse me a moment,” she said to the blandly smiling investor sitting across from her. “Serena will be back in two shakes of a little lamb’s tail.” She stood up and walked a few feet away, to a quiet spot next to a large potted hibiscus.
“All right,” she hissed into the phone. “This better be important, Roby.”
“We’ve found some broken pots and stuff, digging the hole for number five. Looks like maybe Wampanoag Indian artifacts. I was hoping you could come by the site and talk about what to do next.”
“Broken pots? Who gives a fuck—throw them away.”
Roby cleared his throat. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, ma’am. The building code’s real clear on this stuff. We’ve got to stop construction and report the artifacts to Town Hall.”
“Perfect,” Serena said, mentally calculating the size and number of the bribes she’d have to hand out to keep the project moving. “Just what I need.”
Roby had been Jason Duarte’s underling and had stepped in as construction foreman when Duarte died. He was clearly an idiot—even dumber than Duarte had been, if that was possible.
“All right, fine,” Serena said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the voice. “See you then.”
The little phone went silent, and Serena flipped it shut and dropped it into her bag.
“Problems?” said the investor, eyebrows raised.
“Nothing major,” Serena said, tossing her lank blond hair. “Nothing Serena can’t handle.” She raised her nearly empty martini glass. “I’m game for one more—how about you?”
If Serena Hench had been less distracted or less impatient, or had consumed less vodka, she might have thought more about the man who had called her, the man who said he was Dan Roby. It might have occurred to her that Roby sounded older than she remembered him, and that thought might have made her hesitate, for a moment, as she drove to the site in her black Porsche convertible. But she did not hesitate; she drove to the west end as fast as she could, furiously honking at a ponderous Winnebago when it pulled out in front of her on Bradford Street.
When she arrived at the Moors, she parked her car in the sandy, not yet paved lot and got out. The buildings, all in varying stages of completion, rambled up the hillside overlooking the tidal salt marsh. Mosquito Central, the construction workers called it. There was no sign of Dan Roby—only the rattling throb of the crew’s big air compressor and, from inside the skeletal frame of Building 1, the thwack, thwack, thwack of a pneumatic nail gun.
Chapter 18
In the kitchen, blood is everywhere, pooled on the counter, streaking the fridge, the walls; it’s sprayed on every surface in tiny droplets. A woman lies on the floor in a wide red smear. She’s wearing a fleece nightgown with a picture of a bunny rabbit on the front, sitting in a field of pink flowers. Her face is destroyed, caved in so completely that it’s impossible to tell which of her features are which. An aluminum softball bat lies next to her on the green linoleum floor.
There’s a dinette set, yellow Formica and chrome. A man is slumped in one of the chairs, torso flopped forward onto the table. His head is all but gone—Coffin notices his jaw lying on the floor, near the refrigerator. There’s a sawed-off shotgun clenched in his big, rawboned hands. Coffin hears himself whimpering again, but he can’t make it stop. He’s aware of looking out of himself, keeps noticing the rims of his own eyes.
“Hey,” Rashid says. His voice is gentle. He grips Coffin around the bicep. “Hey, Frank.”
Coffin swallows. His mouth is very dry. “Jesus, Rashid,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
_______
“Fuck!” Coffin said, lurching suddenly awake. He felt the chill of an adrenaline surge and shook himself involuntarily, like a dog after a cold swim.
He turned on the light and drank water from the plastic bottle on the nightstand. His heart galloped. He sat still and waited for it to settle down, head cocked, listening. After a minute or two, he looked at his watch. It was twelve thirty—he’d only been asleep for an hour.
He got out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. He thought about calling Jamie, making sure she was okay. The impulse was silly, he knew—calling would just wake her up, make her anxious. He picked up the phone and dialed her number.
“Mmm?” she said.
“It’s me,” Coffin said.
“Frank? What time is it? You okay?”
“I’m fine. I just wanted to check in.”
“Sweet . . .” she said.
Coffin heard her roll over, bedclothes stirring. Her breathing slowed, and she began to snore a little. He looked at the phone and pressed the OFF button.
He was wide-awake. Going back to bed seemed out of the question. So did sitting around the silent house alone.
“What are you looking at?” he said to the stuffed goat. It leveled a yellow stare at him as he tied his running shoes, grabbed a sweatshirt, and pulled the front door shut behind him.
As usual, Billy’s was almost empty. An old woman sat at the bar drinking Chivas Regal. Her dentures sat on the bar beside her, a lit cigarette clenched between the uppers and lowers.
Ticky sat two stools down, watching the Red Sox lose to Oakland. “Son of a bitch,” he said, face twitching as though his gonads were wired to a twelve-volt battery. “Could one of these multimillionaires hit the damn ball, for Chrissakes?”
Captain Nickerson swung in his cage. “Frankie! Frankie! Frankie!” he said.
“Well,” Billy said, “if it ain’t the constable, out drinking when he ought to be investigating.”
“What makes you think I’m not?” Coffin said.
“Why?” Billy said. “Am I a suspect?”
“Sure. Why not. You’re crazy enough.”
“Everybody I know is crazy,” Billy said. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I didn’t say crazy. I said crazy enough.”
“Everybody I know is crazy enough. Hell, we started a pool last week. Two bucks a shot, winner take all. Want in?”
“You’re a sick man,” Coffin said. “Let’s see.”
Billy fetched a big piece of posterboard from behind the bar. A Magic-Markered list of twenty names ran down the left side. Coffin saw his own name there, along with Kotowski
’s, Louie’s, and Tony’s. A second column listed dates by the week, projecting a year into the future. “You pick a suspect and an arrest date. You can share a suspect, you can share a date, but only one customer to a particular date and suspect—get it? Right now most of the money’s on Kotowski. You’re in third.”
“You guys seem pretty convinced it’s a local,” Coffin said. He took a pen from his pocket and made two new entries at the bottom of the posterboard, NONE OF THE ABOVE and NEVER, then signed his name next to each.
“Aren’t you?”
“Anything’s possible,” Coffin said. He fished a cigarette from the almost empty pack in his shirt pocket and lit it.
“Thought you quit,” Billy said.
“Quit is a relative thing, my friend,” Coffin said, exhaling a stream of blue smoke.
Billy wiped the bar in front of Coffin with a stained towel, leaving long, greasy smears. He stopped, lifted his ball cap and scratched his head with a ragged fingernail. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Just when you think you’re done with something—really done with it—back it comes, bigger than ever.”
“What something are we talking about?”
Billy swallowed half his whiskey and leaned across the bar. “Remember when I had my prostate surgery? Five years ago?”
“Sure. We took up a collection.”
“Yeah. Sixty-eight bucks. Thanks.”
“Better than a poke in the eye.”
“Depends how you look at it,” Billy said. He coughed wetly, spit something into a paper towel, and threw it into the trash. Then he grinned. “When you survive a thing like that—a big old tumor up your asshole—you kind of figure there’s got to be a trade-off. It’s got to cost something. Cosmic balance.”
“Cosmic balance,” Coffin said, toasting with his glass of whiskey.