Bad Men (2003)

by John Connolly

  Doug tugged at the lock on the window. It was firmly closed, as were all the windows in the house. He recalled what he believed he had seen: a little girl at his mother’s half-open window, her fingers prising at the gap to widen it. When Doug had entered the room, the girl had stared at him for no more than a second or two, then retreated. By the time Doug reached the window, she was gone from sight. The girl was five or six years of age, or so he had told Joe Dupree, but Doug had said that last part with a slight tremor of doubt in his voice, because the girl might have had the body of a child, but her eyes were much older, and her mouth was all wrong. It was very round, like it was about to give a kiss.

  The funny thing about it was that Joe Dupree, old Melancholy Joe himself, hadn’t laughed at him, or accused him of wasting police time the way that other cop Tuttle had. Instead, Joe had told him to do just what he was doing: keep his mother warm, and keep the doors and windows locked, just in case.

  Just in case.

  Doug went back downstairs, turned on the TV, and tried to watch a game show through a snowstorm worse than the one outside.

  On Church Road, Nancy and Linda Tooker were arguing over the dogs. They’d taken the collie and the German shepherd indoors because of the snow, but now the dogs just wouldn’t stop whining. Nancy had opened the kitchen door to see if they wanted to go back out, but the dogs had instead retreated farther into the house and were now lying in the darkness at the top of the stairs, still crying.

  “It was you who wanted pedigree dogs,” said Nancy. “Damn things are too highly strung. I told you.”

  “Can it!” said her sister. She was trying to connect to AOL, but with no success. Eventually, the screen just froze and she was forced to unplug the computer from the wall. When she tried to restart it, nothing happened.

  “Nancy,” she said. “I think I broke the computer.”

  But Nancy wasn’t listening. Instead, she watched through the kitchen window as gray shapes danced across the snow. Her sister joined her, and together they stood in silence as the insects flew among the snowflakes, seemingly untroubled by the wind that shook the windows and caused closed doors to strike against their frames. Once or twice they banged against the glass and the Tookers got a clear look at the ugly moths.

  Without consulting each other, the two sisters locked all the doors, secured the windows, and took their places with the dogs.

  In his little bedroom, Carl Lubey wrapped himself up warm and pulled on a pair of steel-capped boots. The wind tugged at the windows of his house, causing them to rattle furiously. What little warmth there was seeped out through countless cracks and gaps in the woodwork. Ron was the one with the talent for houses, not Carl. Carl was the mechanic; Ron was the builder, the handyman. Now his brother was gone and Carl was left alone to deal with the wind and the rain and the snow as best he could.

  He went to his bedside locker and removed the Browning. It had a shitty plastic grip plate that was supposed to look like wood but didn’t, and the magazine catch jammed on occasion, but Carl wasn’t fussy. He didn’t think he’d have much call to use it, not if the visitors came through for him. If things went like they were supposed to, his brother would sleep easy in his grave tonight.

  At the heart of the island, close by the Site, there was movement among the trees and beneath the earth. Despite a wind that blew hard from the west, shrubs bent toward the east, and flurries of snow rose in spirals and formed shapes that almost resembled the bodies of men, before they disintegrated and tumbled gently toward the ground. Seen from above, it might have appeared that gray light was seeping out from the ground, or a thin, dirty smoke that left no mark on the snow.

  There were no more whispers. Now the wind sounded like voices, and the voices were joyful.

  Chapter Twelve

  Macy spotted the ferry pulling into port from her vantage point on the second floor. Its arrival had been delayed by the weather, Thorson unwilling to push the ferry’s speed into little more than double figures. The faint streamer of smoke was barely visible through the thickening snow, although Thorson had lit the boat itself like a Christmas tree. It almost hurt her eyes to look at it.

  “Ferry’s in,” she called to Dupree.

  He was catching up on paperwork in the little office. The doors leading outside were now firmly closed and the heating had kicked in enough to enable him to remove his jacket.

  “You don’t have to go,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s my turn.”

  “Nah, I’m dressed for it. Besides, it will give me something to do.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and returned to his reports.

  The wind had picked up force and the snow blew directly into her face, stinging her cheeks. She removed the windshield cover from the Explorer and tossed it on the passenger seat, then started the engine and drove carefully down to the dock, parking over by the passenger shelter until the ferry came in. The chains on the wheels made a ratcheting sound on the road, and the snowplow attachment that she and Dupree had fitted on earlier that evening rattled against the grille.

  A handful of passengers disembarked from the ferry, all of them apparently locals who raced for their own cars or caught rides from friends or family. Macy watched them leave, then saw another, smaller vessel heading into port. The water taxi docked and a harried-looking woman was helped out by the boatman. There seemed to be some argument, and Macy was about to head over and intervene when the boatman abruptly turned away, cast off, and headed out of port. He paused briefly to exchange some words with Thorson, who leaned over from his roost to talk, then continued on his way.

  The woman did a double take when she saw the Explorer, then headed straight up the hill to where her car was parked. Macy followed, pulling in alongside her as she fumbled with her car keys.

  “Everything okay, ma’am?”

  The woman looked at her and tried to smile.

  “Yes, thank you, everything’s fine. I’m just late to pick up my son, that’s all. He’ll be worried.”

  Macy smiled, as if she really understood what it was like to have a child waiting for her to return, but the woman was no longer looking at her. Instead, she was staring over Macy’s shoulder, looking back out to sea. Macy glanced in her rearview mirror, but the ferry was the only boat in sight. The water taxi was already lost amid the snow.

  “Can I ask your name, ma’am?”

  The woman jerked as if she’d just been hit with an electric shock.

  “Marianne Elliot,” she said. “My name is Marianne Elliot.”

  “Were you having trouble with the taxi?”

  “Just a disagreement about the fare, that’s all. In the end, I paid a little over the odds, but it’s a bad night. It was good of him to take me over after I missed the ferry.”

  Macy examined the woman’s face but saw no reason to doubt her story. She patted the car roof and moved back.

  “Well, Miss Elliot, you take care on the road. I know you’re in a hurry, but you want to get back to your son safe and sound, don’t you?”

  For the first time, the woman seemed to truly notice her.

  “Yes,” she said. “More than anything else in the world.”

  Thorson was sipping coffee in the cabin of the ferry when Macy came onboard.

  The captain offered her his flask and a spare cup, but she declined.

  “You’re not making another crossing, right?” she asked. Dupree had told her to check, although he had been pretty certain that Thorson would not be taking the ferry out again.

  Thorson stared out into the night. He even looks like a ferry captain, thought Macy: white beard, red cheeks, yellow oilskins. He was a good captain, according to Dupree; in all its long history, there had never been an accident involving Thorson’s ferry. He was just more respectful of the sea than most.

  “You kidding? There’s already a small-craft advisory in place, and even the Casco Bay ferries are going to stop running in an hour. There won’t be a boat on the water after that. Soon as I fin
ish my coffee I’m heading home, and that’ll be me done until the morning.”

  “Okay, just thought I’d make sure. Say, you know the captain of that water taxi that came in just now?”

  “Yeah, that’s Ed Oldfield. I was surprised to see him out so far on a night like this.”

  “He say anything to you about the woman he brought over?”

  “Marianne? No, just that she seemed to want him to wait for her and take her back to Portland. He wouldn’t do it. If he waited any longer he’d be stuck here overnight, and he’s got a family at home on Chebeague.”

  Macy thanked him and returned to the Explorer, then headed back through town toward the station house. Dupree was still hunched over his desk, painstakingly typing details into the primitive-looking computer on his desk as he tried to avoid hitting two keys simultaneously with his big fingers. He looked up as Macy entered, brushing snow from her jacket.

  “Anything unusual?”

  “A few locals, and a water taxi. Just one passenger onboard. She said her name was Marianne Elliot.”

  Macy picked up on the look that crossed Dupree’s face.

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Was he blushing, she wondered?

  “She’s a friend.”

  “She was in quite a hurry. Said she was late to pick up her kid. Thorson said he thought she might be trying to get back to the mainland tonight.”

  Dupree frowned. “Nobody’s going back to Portland tonight. Maybe I’ll take a run by her place later, make sure she’s okay.”

  Despite herself, Macy felt one of her eyebrows arch.

  “What?” said Dupree.

  “Nothing,” said Macy, trying to sound innocent. “Nothing like a concerned, active police force.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded dubious. “Speaking of concerned and active, you mind taking a short ride out?” Dupree was worried about Marianne now. He couldn’t understand why she would want to return to Portland before morning, unless there was something wrong. He’d use his own Jeep to drop in at her place as soon as he had finished his paperwork.

  “No problem, but that snow is falling pretty heavily and the wind is picking up some. Soon, it’s going to start to drift.”

  “I don’t want you to make a full circuit of the island, not in this weather. Larry Amerling told me you were out by the main watchtower today. You think you can find it again?”

  “It’s easy enough to find: take a right on Division and straight on till morning, right?”

  “That’s it. Heard you ran into Carl Lubey while you were out there.”

  “He was charming. Still single too. Quite a catch.”

  “Yeah, like catching rabies. Could you swing by Lubey’s place?” He pointed it out to her on the wall map. “It’s a shithole, so you can’t miss it, even in this weather. Couple of rusted-out cars in the drive and a big screw-you satellite dish in the yard. Last night, I had to roust him from the bar along with a mainland lowlife named Terry Scarfe. According to Thorson, Terry didn’t come back over today, but I still don’t like the fact that he and Lubey were spending time together.”

  Macy zipped up her jacket and got ready to go, but Dupree stopped her.

  “I guess you already know it, but Carl Lubey is the brother of a man I shot. I killed him. Carl’s a sleazebag, but he’s harmless alone. If I go out there, I’ll only rile him up, and the next thing we know we’ll have him cuffed to the chair over there, smelling up the place until morning. I hate to do this to you on your first night and all, but it will put my mind at rest if I know that Carl Lubey is tucked up safe in his bed. The tree coverage should mean that the road is still okay, but you run into any problems and you just come right back, y’hear?”

  Macy told him that she would. Secretly, she was pleased to be leaving the station house. The TV wasn’t working properly and she was likely to be cooped up inside until morning. One last trip out would kill some time and leave her with more of her book to read. She drove carefully up Island Avenue until she left the street lamps behind, then put her headlights on full and followed the coast toward Division.

  Carl Lubey was not tucked up safe in his bed, although he was starting to wish that he was. Curiously, he was thinking about Macy, just as Macy was now thinking about him, because he was staring into the innards of his truck, a truck that right now just would not start.

  The cop had warned him. She said she’d seen it billowing fumes, but he just hadn’t listened.

  Son of a bitch.

  It had been driving okay earlier in the day, but now, just when he needed it to run, the engine was turning over with a click. The battery was new, so it couldn’t be that. Inside his garage, with the lamp hanging from the hood, Carl took a rag and wiped the oil from his hands. It could be the starter, he figured, but that would take time to repair and he didn’t have that kind of time. He had people to meet, and if Scarfe was telling the truth, they were the kind of people who wouldn’t take kindly to being kept waiting. He didn’t want them to wait, either. The sooner they got what they wanted, the sooner he would get what he wanted, which was a big dead policeman.

  Carl was a coward. He knew he was a coward, although sometimes, when he was liquored up, he liked to tell himself that he was just smart, and that men like him, smaller and weaker than those around them, had to find other ways to fight back when people did them a bad turn. If that meant stabbing them in the back, then so be it. If they hadn’t crossed him, they wouldn’t have had to worry about their backs anyway.

  Carl’s brother was different—strong and hard and, hell, maybe even kind of mean, but a real man, one who had stood up for his little brother time and time again. And because Ron had been a stand-up guy for Carl, when the time came, Carl had been a stand-up guy for him.

  Carl still remembered the call. They’d both been out drinking in Portland, and Ron had headed off with some woman he’d picked up in Three-Dollar Dewey’s. She looked kind of familiar to Carl. According to Ron, she was Jeanne Aiello, all grown up. Generations of Aiellos had lived out on Dutch until Jeanne’s parents had grown tired of the isolation and had left for more “civilized” surroundings. Now little Jeanne was back in Maine, working in one of those tourist stores in the Old Port, and seemed real happy to be making Ron’s acquaintance once again.

  Carl left them to it, and because he was still thirsty and had a beer appetite, he took a cab out to the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue and got himself a big basket of wings. It wasn’t Carl’s favorite bar, owing to the fact that the Portland cops liked to drink there, but he was hungry and the Bear was one of the few bars that served food late at night. He was halfway through his wings when his cell phone started ringing and he heard his brother’s voice when he answered the call. Ron wasn’t panicked, though, or afraid. He just told Carl to get in a cab and head over to Windham, and Carl had done just that, leaving the cab about a half mile from the address his brother had given him, as he had been instructed to do. Ron was waiting at the door of the house when he got there, and waved his brother in quickly. There were cuts on his face.

  The woman was lying on the bathroom floor, and her face was all torn up. The mirror above the sink was shattered and there was a big shard of it in her eye. Smaller pieces were embedded in her cheeks and her forehead. Carl looked at his brother’s right hand and saw that some of the woman’s hair was still caught in his nails.

  “I just lost it, man,” said Ron. “I don’t know what happened. She brought me back here and we was drinking, fooling around. We head for the bedroom and I try to get it on and next thing she’s pushing me away, calling me an animal. We started fighting, she ran to the bathroom, and then I was just pushing her against the wall and I couldn’t stop.”

  He began to cry.

  “I couldn’t stop, Carlie. I couldn’t stop.”

  It was Carl’s finest moment. He told his brother to go find some rubber gloves and cleaning products, anything that could help them clear the scene. While Ron wiped e
verything, Carl wrapped the woman in sheets, then double-bagged her with black plastic garbage sacks, using tape to bind her tight as a fly’s ass. They washed everything down, until the house was cleaner than it had ever been before, then filled a suitcase with clothes, makeup and what little jewelry they could find. There wasn’t much that could be done about the broken mirror, so Carl just removed the last pieces from the frame and put a small vanity mirror from the bedroom on the bathroom sink. That way, he hoped, anyone who saw it would think that Jeanne had broken the bathroom mirror herself and was content to use the vanity mirror until she got around to replacing it. They put the suitcase and the body in the trunk of her car and drove down to their boat. Jeanne was loaded into the cabin and covered with a tarp, and then Carl parked her car on India Street and walked back to rejoin his brother. When they were half an hour out of port, they weighted her body with Carl’s old toolbox, which they kept in the boat for emergencies, and then dumped her overboard. She was never seen again by any living person, her body descending beneath the waves, lost to the eyes of the world and watched only by the ghost of a boy, for this was his place.

  Jeanne Aiello was reported missing by her parents two days later, but by then her car had already been found. The cops were suspicious, maybe because Carl and Ron had gone a little overboard with their cleaning, leading the cops to wonder why a woman seemingly intent on heading off without telling anyone where she was going would clean her house so assiduously before she left. But there was no body for them to examine, and the description of the man with whom she had left the bar was so general that half the guys in Portland could have filled the bill. It looked as if Carl and Ron had managed to get away, literally, with murder.

  But the relief was only temporary. It pained Carl to see the deterioration in his brother. He stopped working, started drinking more, and began talking gibberish about the woods. That was what frightened Carl most, the stuff about the forest. His brother was spending more and more time in the woods. He liked to hunt deer, and before the cull in ’99, the island had been nearly overrun with them. Nobody objected much to folks shooting them and filling up their freezers with the meat, although there was no way that Ron and Carl had a freezer big enough for all the dead meat Ron had created in the woods. But Ron wasn’t even hunting anymore. He would just head out into the woods with a couple of six-packs or a bottle of sour mash, and when he returned he would be carrying on conversations that had clearly begun a long time before, and were the continuation of some ongoing argument.