by Rory Flynn
With her curling voice and fake tough talk, Marnie makes Harkness feel old at twenty-nine. “I’ll remember that,” he says. “You seen Thalia?”
“Saw her in the kitchen.” Marnie points. “Over there.”
“Thanks.” He makes his way through the crowd. Like Marnie, half of them think Harkness is wearing a costume. The others sidle away, sure he’s here to shut down the party. He walks across the loft floor trying to keep it together, one foot in front of the next. No staggering. No falling. That’s the order of the day.
His cell phone rings and Harkness clicks it open.
“Thalia, where are you?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Who’s this?”
“Pauley Fitz,” a man’s voice says. “Turnpike Toreador. Happy anniversary, Harkness.”
Thalia’s passed out, face down on a paint-stained wooden table crowded with empties, surrounded by a clutch of art guys in thin leather jackets smoking cigarettes. They turn toward Harkness, decide he’s not a real cop, and keep talking. The tallest of them, wearing old-style black jeans and a tight white pocket T-shirt, is telling a joke. Harkness hangs back.
“So there’s this clown and this little girl. And they’re walking into a forest.” Art guy bends his shining bald forehead toward the listeners. “The girl says, ‘I’m scared, these woods are creepy.’” He pauses. “Then the clown stops, turns to the girl, and says, ‘How do you think I feel? I’m gonna have to walk back home alone.’”
They laugh, paper-white faces twisted, crooked teeth flashing. They’ve never seen a dead girl. Or pieces of one.
“C’mon, Thalia.” Harkness shakes her shoulder and her eyes open. “Gotta head out. Now.”
Thalia reaches back for her coat. No confusion, no fighting it. Harkness takes her arm and leads her out of the kitchen. The art guys watch them like crows.
“Never seen anyone that drunk,” someone whispers in their wake.
“Thalia? Thalia Havoc?” another says. “That girl’s legendary.”
Harkness shoulders the heavy door to one side and they fall into Thalia’s loft, locked in a kiss so hard that Harkness feels her teeth. She’s peeling off his uniform before the door slams closed. She helps him unbuckle the belt and the leather and metal viscera of his job clunks to the floor.
Thalia strides across the dark wood floor. There’s a studio with an easel and canvases on one side and a cluster of mismatched furniture and a futon on the other. Ten minutes ago she was passed out at a kitchen table. Now she’s wide-awake, buoyed by a brutal second wind, stalking across the splintered loft floor to light candles on the windowsill. The candlelight and a night of drinking transform her from waitress-artist into something much more primitive. As Harkness watches, his head turns heavy. The room narrows and tilts like a funhouse, dropping him to his knees.
“Whoa.” He shakes his head to clear it, but it doesn’t help.
“Too much whiskey?”
“Maybe.” He takes a deep breath and stands, shakily, sure that more than whiskey is messing with him.
“This should perk you right up.” Thalia pulls off her tall boots and jeans and kicks them across the dim loft. Glass shatters. She rips off her blouse and buttons click across the floor.
Thalia lowers her thong and flings it across the room with a deft kick. She kneels on the battered red couch, her breasts pressed against the velvet curve of the couch. “M’ere, Eddy.”
Harkness sways toward the couch. He reaches out to trace the skein of freckles across her shoulder blades, then runs his finger down her spine. Deep at its base, hidden where no one except her lovers would see it, waits a tiny tattoo of a red hummingbird with a crude black X slashed through it.
She pulls back. “Don’t touch that.”
“What is it?”
“Bad luck. Ancient history.”
Harkness tries to remember where he’s seen that red bird before.
“Hurry,” she whispers.
Harkness moves his fingers lower to part her from behind. Thalia’s breathing turns faster. He inches inside.
Thalia gives a low growl. “Yes.”
Harkness closes his eyes and the room spins. He opens them to see Thalia’s pale back moving in the murky light. “You’re so beautiful.”
“Don’t talk shit.” She shakes her head and presses her eyes closed. “No more talking. Need to concentrate . . .”
Harkness reaches out and cups a swaying breast to still it.
Thalia grits her teeth and bucks hard against him. “More. Now, Eddy.”
Harkness wraps his arms around her and pulls her to him, then harder. He’s about to come inside her but wants her satisfied shout to be the last sound he hears before he passes out. To distract and delay, he goes through a litany of Back Bay cross streets—Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth . . .
When Harkness gets to Gloucester Street, his strangled call echoes through the dark loft as Thalia turns her head and screams into the red velvet.
3
HARKNESS WAKES with his arms wrapped around Thalia from behind—one hand on her hipbone, the other tucked under her breasts. Sprawled on the futon, where they finally collapsed, their bodies dovetail, legs tangle, and skin adheres. The planty scent of sex wafts from the wrinkled sheets. Thin October light slants off the splintered floorboards to limn the dusty footprints and the smudged giveaway pint glasses on the windowsill. Morning is about flaws.
He picks up his phone and squints at the screen—a few minutes after six. He uncurls from Thalia. He can’t shower, might wake her. He’s not even sure where the shower is. He gathers his uniform from the floor. It’s wrinkled but should pass. Then he looks for the thick black leather belt that holds his gun and radio. He remembers dropping it on the floor when they came in from the loft party. He nudges the clothes on the floor with his foot.
Thalia stirs and sits up. “Eddy? Come back to bed.”
“Can’t. Got an early shift.” His brain hurts when he talks.
“Call in sick.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
Thalia reaches out and touches his leg. “Call in well, then. Tell the other cops you can’t get out of my bed before noon.”
“I wish.”
“It’s rude to fuck and run. Especially the first night you stay over.”
“Got to be at work by seven.”
“Minding the meters.” Thalia lowers her head back down on the pillow, her hair a red-tinged tangle. “Least you still have a job.”
“Thalia, I lost my gun.”
“It’s probably with your jacket.” Thalia points toward the couch.
Harkness lifts his coat and finds the belt coiled underneath but no gun. He pats his coat pockets. They’re empty. “It’s not here.”
“Well, you were pretty out of it last night.”
“What?”
“Talking shit. Crashing like a dead man, then waking up all wired and weird. You walked to the donkey place to get me smokes, ’member?”
Harkness doesn’t remember. “What donkey place?”
“That gas station on Southampton Street, the one with the donkey on the sign. Gas that’s got kick. Must’ve dropped it on the way back or something. Just walk toward the corner.”
“No. No. No.” Harkness lifts up clothes, newspapers, dishes—and throws them to the floor.
Thalia pulls the creased sheet up to cover her breasts. “Don’t get all freaked out.”
“This is serious, Thalia.”
“Then go find it. Didn’t you tell me you were really good at finding things?”
Harkness retraces the straight route to the gas station with a kicking donkey on its sign, scanning the sidewalk and finding only cigarette butts, burger wrappers, beer bottles, receipts, losing scratch cards, crushed vodka nips, and a couple of mismatched gloves. He walks past tow lots with prowling Dobermans, a food bank with a line stretching around the block, and the low, hulking South Bay House of Correction, where Narco-Intel sent dozens
of dealers. Harkness wonders if any of them are watching out the tiny square windows as he dives down over and over, hands on cold cobblestones, to look beneath cars.
The Southeast Expressway roars with morning traffic and his head throbs like a slowcore band warming up. He’s had rough nights out before, but nothing like this—a lost night giving way to a cold reckoning.
He walks into a cluttered convenience store attached to the gas station, the air thick with the smell of dawn smokers and burnt coffee.
“You!” The man behind the counter waves him forward. “What the fuck’re you doing back here?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“No, really. Get the fuck out of here.”
Harkness shakes his head.
“You really don’t know, do you?” The manager’s goatee rises and falls.
“No.” Harkness almost remembers being here.
“Okay, then. Got something to show you.”
“Gotta go to work.”
“You, amigo, owe me a minute or two.” He leads Harkness into the office, and a sullen clerk shuffles from the lottery machine to the counter to take his place.
“Let’s roll the tape, okay?” The manager reaches over and presses the buttons beneath a closed-circuit TV. The clerk flails his arms and customers flee backwards through the front door. When the time code hits 2 A.M. Harkness sees a cop barging from cooler to counter.
The manager hits a button and the action slows to show the cop lurching through the store, pawing through bags of chips and knocking candy on the floor. Harkness is reassured and sickened to spot his Glock 17 dangling in his right hand.
“Mind telling me what the fuck you were thinking?”
“Long night.” No amount of whiskey and beer could turn him into the monster he sees on the screen.
“Even longer for my shit-shift guy. He called and woke me up, asking if he should call the cops or not. I said no, ’cuz the cops were already here.”
“Thanks for that.” Harkness looks away and his eyes fall on the smudgy photo of the store manager’s smiling wife and chubby kids thumbtacked over the monitor. Looks like Dad’s been bringing snacks home . . .
“Hey!”
“What?” Focus, Eddy.
“I was saying that we’re glad to see a cop around here. Almost never happens. Even if you were drunk and scaring my customers.”
“Look, I’m really sorry,” Harkness says. And he is. Sorry he’s hit a new low. Sorry to see his gun on the screen but gone from its holster now.
The manager gives Harkness a cold stare for a moment, then rolls his eyes. “No real harm done,” he says. “Just don’t do it again.”
“I won’t,” Harkness says.
“If you show up here again all wrecked, I’ll go viral with the tape, amigo. You’ll be all over the Internet.”
Too late for that, Harkness thinks. “Got it.” He rushes toward the door.
“Hey!”
Harkness stops.
“Be careful out there.” The manager laughs until he starts to wheeze.
Harkness figures he probably wandered on the way back, so he takes the side streets to Thalia’s loft. He’s still cringing, replaying the video in his mind, watching the out-of-control zombie cop whirling around the store. Harkness knows rock bottom when he sees it.
Painful as it was to watch, the tape proves that Harkness didn’t lose his gun at the Zero Room or the art party. It has to be between the gas station and Thalia’s. Or someone else found it already, a possibility that Harkness can’t even think about.
Harkness checks his watch. He has to be at the station in half an hour, about as long as it’ll take to drive west to Nagog at eighty miles an hour.
Walking down Atkinson Street, trying to scan every inch of the shattered sidewalk and keep the panic down, he almost runs into a kid in a puffy orange parka that encases him like a rind.
“What you looking for, Jim-Jim?”
“My gun,” he says.
“Your gun? I can get you a gun.”
The guy’s all Fubu and Kangol, white unlaced Pumas, emergency-colored parka, and gold-mirror shades. Looks like a street player circa years ago. He’s probably on his way to Boston Latin.
“What kind of gun?”
“Nine millimeter. Flexi-action automatic. Like a machine gun. Like a fuckin’ mortar, man,” Fubu says, fake grilles glinting. “I can get you fuckin’ ordnance. Stuff left over from Afghanistan. Meet and exceed your expectations. Pop a head off in a jiffy.”
“I don’t want just any gun,” Harkness says. “Has to be my gun. Glock 17, custom issue. Got a scrape on the grip. Lost it somewhere around here. If you find it, I’ll pay big.” Sweat drips down his sides. Harkness peels back his coat and shows his badge and empty holster. “I need the gun that goes with this.”
“Shit, man,” Fubu says. “Should of told me you was a cop.”
“Thought my uniform might have clued you in.”
“That uniform looks fake. Where you a cop at, anyhow?”
“Nagog.”
Fubu squints. “Fancy town. Out west, right? Picket fences. White folks.”
“That’s pretty much it. They need cops, too.”
“For what?”
Harkness shrugs. “When they lock their keys in the Subaru?”
“Figured you was an actor or something. They always filming some dumb-ass cop movie on account of it still looks like dirty old Boston around here. I keep my eye out for your gun, though. Things you start looking for have a way of showing up, ’ventually.”
“If you find it, I’ll pay you a thousand, cash.” Harkness’s misfiring brain spits out the offer before he has time to think about where he’s going to get that kind of money.
“How about two?”
“Sure.” Harkness bends down and puts his hands on his knees, breathes deep, and wonders how he ended up haggling to buy back his own gun.
Fubu perks up. “I’ll do some looking around and get back to you.”
“Wait. Name’s Eddy. How’ll you know where to find me?”
“You’re cribbing with that lady with the red hair. One that lives over there, right?” He points toward Thalia’s loft.
“How’d you know that?”
Fubu shrugs. “You’ll be back, Eddy, my man. ’Cuz she is so fine.” He shuts his eyes and downloads his own private porno, starring Thalia.
As Harkness walks to his patrol car, he knows this kid is never going to come up with his gun. It’s not lost on the ragged edge of the South End.
It’s not lost at all.
4
SIREN SCREAMING, HARKNESS speeds west down Route 2, parting the cars on the crowded highway and racing past them. “Young, Fast, Iranians” blares from the shitty speakers. The dashboard clock moves closer to seven. The road rises slowly and crosses flatland marshes and low hills, maples flaming and fields blanched by an early frost.
Harkness learned to drive here, going to Cambridge for hardcore shows at the Middle East or to hang out next to the Harvard Square T stop. Although he did stupid things when he was younger, Harkness never would have lost a gun.
He turns down the F.U.’s in midscream and dials Narco-Intel, its number as familiar as his own.
“Harky-Hark. Up with the sun, are you?” Patrick’s familiar voice cheers him for a moment.
“Driving to work,” Harkness says. “I need you to check something for me.”
“You ask, we do it. You know how we are here, Harky. Like your loving family of misfit toys.”
Harkness smiles.
“What do you need?”
Harkness thinks about telling Patrick about his lost gun but stops himself. “Guy called me late last night pretending to be Pauley Fitz.”
“Sick fuck.”
“Can you look up a cell phone number and see if it’s his?” Harkness checks his phone and reads the number.
“That dude’s dead, Harky. Footnote to history. Stain on the Pike.”
“The g
uy who called me wasn’t dead.”
“Yet.”
“Right. So can you check it out?”
“Not a problem, boss.” Patrick pauses. “When you coming back?”
“Future cloudy. Check back later,” Harkness says.
“Don’t go all Magic 8 Ball on me.”
“Wisdom comes from unusual sources.”
“No doubt about that Harky. No doubt.”
Harkness drives past the exits for Concord and spins through a traffic rotary next to a state prison topped with concertina wire shimmering in the morning sun. He found an inmate’s stash of PCP in a drainpipe there once, dangling from a thread of bright white dental floss. Like many hides—great concept, lazy execution.
In a few minutes, the white church spires rise above the thick pine forest. Tumbled walls of gray stones border ancient fields dotted with rusting tractors and sagging barns. Harkness is home now, crossing the town line into Nagog, a colonial town ten miles square, home to ten thousand no-nonsense New Englanders. Cities churn, suburbs strive, but small towns stay the same. Harkness knows almost everyone who lives in Nagog. And everyone knows him.
After the incident, the BPD internal review put Harkness on unpaid administrative leave for a year, a polite way to get him out of the way. Taking a patrolman gig in his quiet hometown seemed like a penance at first. But when Boston scorned him, when his name became a punch line in the comedy clubs, when Sox fans held up signs with his face on it in the Fenway Park bleachers, when Boston Herald editorials railed against him—Harkness was relieved to be back home, serving out his time in the minor league of law enforcement.
Like any small town, Nagog can be annoying. Young moms in Lululemon yoga pants clog the booths at the Nagog Bakery. Elders in Outbacks drift from lane to lane, lost in memories or transfixed by foliage. Guys smelling like vodka and toothpaste hog the public computers at the library while they check their stock portfolios. Rich kids in expensive leather jackets skulk around the parking lot of the E-Z Mart. But his hometown has an old-fashioned reserve and politeness that Harkness admires, craves even.