Third Rail
Page 3
Nagog isn’t very exciting, but it’s predictable. And sometimes that’s enough.
***
The Nagog Five and Ten isn’t open yet but Harkness knocks when he sees Lee walking around inside.
Lee peers through his thick glasses and comes to the door, twisting the deadbolt open. “Eddy.”
“Lee.”
Short and owlish, wearing an AC/DC T-shirt and baggy jeans, Lee looks pretty much the same as he did every day in high school. “Need something?”
Harkness pauses for a second and thinks about whether he should tell Lee. They’ve known each other since grade school. And he really doesn’t have a choice. “Yeah,” Harkness says. “I need a gun.”
“Don’t they give you one of those when you’re a cop? Even here?”
“They do. But it looks like I . . . left mine somewhere.” Harkness lifts his leather jacket and points to the empty holster. “Need something to fill in for it.”
“A stunt gun.”
“Right, a stunt gun.”
“You’ve come to the right place.”
They walk inside. The dark store smells like a laboratory storeroom, safe and scientific.
Lee points. “Over in aisle two.”
Three aisles stretch from front to back of the store, lined with office supplies, toys, and cheap candy—all organized by Lee and his acolytes of old-school retail. They come to a pegboard of toy guns—silver cap pistols, ray guns, potato guns, and dozens more. Harkness tries to concentrate but his eyes unfocus. Lee’s dark store is cluttered and overwhelming. And last night still hovers like an inexplicable storm cloud.
Lee picks up a brown, furry gun with a smiling monkey face at the end of the barrel. “Want a monkey gun? We’ve sold lots of them.” When he squeezes the trigger a scream echoes through the store.
“I think I need something less furry.”
“We had to take the real-looking ones off the shelves a couple of years back,” Lee says. “People were using them to rob banks and what have you.”
Harkness glances at the clock over the door. There’s less than five minutes to get to the station or face the wrath of the Sweathog.
“Let me check out back.” Lee runs to the storage room and comes back carrying a gray plastic handgun with a brown grip. Harkness unsnaps his holster and Lee drops in the toy gun. “Perfect fit.”
“Handle’s kind of shiny. People might be able to tell.”
Lee holds a finger in the air then rushes across the store. He comes back with a piece of sandpaper from the hardware aisle and dulls the grip with an expert rub.
“Thanks, looks great,” Harkness says. “You’re a genius.”
“And look where it got me?” Lee points around the store. “Selling candy and trash bags.”
Harkness reaches for his wallet but Lee waves him away.
“But here . . . you’ll need these.” Lee dumps a handful of bright plastic disks into his hand. “It shoots them. Let me know if you need more.”
Harkness smiles. “I will.”
“And Eddy?”
They stop at the front door.
“I think you might need this, too.” Lee throws him a roll of mints from the counter. “You smell like a bar.”
5
SERGEANT DABILIS’S RED SOX cap is jammed on his head above a shiny forehead so moist it could seal an envelope. The Sweathog’s shirt-drenching sweats are legendary. Harkness signs in and maneuvers through the Pit, crowded during the shift change. He edges toward the squad room for a coffee.
“Do you people know what happened last night?” Sergeant Dabilis gives a wan, sick smile.
No one says anything. Harkness freezes.
Sergeant Dabilis shakes his head. “They clinched it—worst season in American League history. Ever.” Sergeant Dabilis turns cardiac red at the thought. “You jinxed us,” he hisses at Harkness, then points to his hat. “The Curse Is Worse. Heard that one?”
Harkness has heard it a lot. It’s the rallying cry of every Yankees fan.
“Well, now that the season is over, it’s time for the whole Red Sox Nation to take a steaming dump right on your pointy head. Not millions of little dumps. One really big dump.”
“Could you shut up?” From her desk, Debbie the dispatcher gives Sergeant Dabilis the finger without looking up. Ramble, Nagog’s excuse for a detective, looks up from a personal phone call. Watt, Fredette, Sorger, and the other cops say nothing. Like kids in a dysfunctional family, the Nagog cops have learned to keep their heads low.
Captain William Munro stands in the doorway of his office. “Harkness, can I see you here for a moment?” He disappears inside.
“He’s gonna fire you.” Sergeant Dabilis’s smile brightens. “You are so out of here.”
Harkness walks to the far corner of the captain’s bright office and stands next to the state flag. “Sir.” He hopes that the captain can’t smell his sweet funk of sweat, alcohol, and Thalia.
“You’ve been with us for almost a year now,” the captain says. “I’m sure you know that.”
Harkness says nothing. A friend of the family, Captain Munro has watched out for Harkness since he was a young punk getting into trouble in town. The captain’s like a Scottish uncle, full of honest advice and dry wit. But he’s all business when they’re at work.
“Received a call this morning. From Boston.”
The floor shifts. Someone recognized Harkness running down the Turnpike like a crazed marathoner or staggering out of the Zero Room.
“Administrative Affairs is looking for a recommendation to the commissioner.”
“About what, sir?”
“About your performance here. And whether you’re ready to go back to Boston and rejoin Narco-Intel.”
Harkness focuses. “And what’s your recommendation, sir?”
“I’m just a town cop, so what I tell them probably doesn’t carry much weight. But I have to say that I don’t really want to lose you. Good to have a smart local boy on the force. And you’re doing a great job. An example to the rest of them.”
“Of what?”
“Of dealing with disgrace, gracefully.”
Harkness stares at the state flag hanging in the corner and tries to decipher the Latin. By the sword we seek peace . . . then something else.
“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded, Harkness. Bad things happen to good cops all the time. Even the best cops. And you’re handling it instead of whining about it to the press or running away and getting a cushy job in private security. I admire that. I can’t speak for Boston. But I think they’d be lucky to get you back.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“For now, just keep doing your job. Stay out of trouble.”
Harkness stares. Last night he reenacted a running of the bulls on the Turnpike with cars, then went drinking at a notorious Chinatown dump that retails Thai sex slaves. He let a former waitress he met on a raid drive his squad car before making drunken, college-style love to her on a scratchy couch. Just a few hours ago, he was reeling around a convenience store like Mel Gibson on a saint’s day. Now he’s carrying a plastic gun that fires colorful disks.
Staying out of trouble doesn’t seem like an option anymore.
Harkness wonders if maybe he wants to get caught. Maybe he just wants the humiliation to end any way it can.
“Harkness?”
Drifting again. “Sir?”
“You can go now.”
Sergeant Dabilis struts around the Pit in his new Sox jacket, red and shiny as cheap candy. “Want to know a secret?” he shouts at the row of desks, where the day-shift cops are working the phones and typing reports.
No one says anything. They just roll their eyes.
“That final game of the ’04 Series, when Lowe clinched it? I jack off to that game, I really do.” He raises his glistening face toward the fluorescent lights.
“Gross.” Debbie the dispatcher shakes her head.
“Shut. Up!” Watt shouts from his desk.
“Hey, Harkness.” Sergeant Dabilis stares at him as if he’s sidelining injuries, bad throws, batting slumps, and Buckner’s ’86 fuckup patched together into human form. “The Sox are going to bounce back. Next year, we’re going all the way. And no one’s going to mess it up. Not even you, Harkness. It’s going to be perfect.”
***
The best night of Harkness’s cop career started on a stakeout on Commercial Street, stars fading over the harbor as the last bars and restaurants on the wharves shut down.
“Must be nice to be popular,” said Harkness’s partner, DeFrancesco, when the black SUV with tinted windows pulled up behind their unmarked Ford. “Don’t your pal ever sleep?”
“Doubtful.” Harkness opened the door and stepped outside. “See you in a few minutes.”
“More like a few hours,” DeFrancesco said. “If I get shot, it’s his fault.”
The SUV burbled with the low voices of dispatchers. It was empty except for the silent driver and its lone passenger, Boston Police Commissioner James Lattimore.
Harkness took the black-leather jump seat. “Sir.”
The commissioner nodded at him, then shouted at the smoked-glass divider. “Keep driving until I tell you to stop.”
The SUV curled around the northern edge of the city, waterfront to the left, darkened bank towers to the right. The commissioner perched like a paratrooper on the edge of his seat, glancing out both windows in sequence.
“Never thought I’d say it,” he said quietly. “But I’m starting to like this city.”
“Can take a while, sir. Sometimes a couple of years. Or decades.”
“Brahmins and boyos, students and start-ups, numb-nuts and Nobel laureates—all jammed together. Roads used to be cow paths. Everyone used to be Irish and Catholic. Unless they were Italian or Jewish. Short summers, long grudges. You don’t have to say hello or pretend to be polite. Sound like Boston to you, Harkness?”
“Kind of, sir.”
“Sure, it’s reductive. But that’s our job, Harkness. Reduce the city to districts. Narrow down suspects to find the bad guy. Lower crime. We’re all about reducing everything down to its essence. Like poets.”
Harkness lets the debatable comparison slide. “Poets with deadly force.”
“That’s right, smart guy.” The mayor had lured Commissioner Lattimore from his job as first deputy commissioner of the NYPD three years ago, the same month that Harkness became a new officer. When Harkness got promoted to detective before anyone in his class, Commissioner Lattimore took notice. And never quit noticing. He thought of Harkness as another outsider, a confidant he could trust.
The car streaked past South Station, dark except for the clock glowing beneath a lone cement eagle. The commissioner turned to Harkness. “Got to tell you, it hurts to see one of our best cops out on the street doing speed-and-weed ops.”
“It’s my job, sir.”
The commissioner waved at the city streaking by. “The war on drugs is over. And we lost. Ought to be shutting down digital black markets instead of lurking around the North End waiting for . . .”
“A crank dealer from Dorchester who works the restaurants. They call him Eighty-Six because he always sells out.”
“Nice,” the commissioner said. “But we need to look deeper, lower. Anonymizing networks, bitcoins, untraceable cell phones, drugs we’ve never heard of until they start killing people—if you can see the crime happening, it probably isn’t that important.”
Harkness smiled, knew he’d be telling DeFrancesco about this latest gem from their boss.
“We’re not just driving around the city shooting the shit tonight, Harkness,” he said. “Got something important to run by you. We’re starting up an experimental unit, Narco-Intel.”
“Sounds interesting, sir.” It sounded like another initiative that might not make it beyond PowerPoint at headquarters.
The commissioner read his mind. “This is the real deal, Harkness. Not just another task force. We need a dozen or so young officers like you. Smart, tough, excellent instincts, willing to bend the rules a little. Maybe a lot.” The commissioner leaned forward. “So what do you think? Are you up for it?”
Harkness looked him in the eye. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” The commissioner smiled for the first time. “Congratulations, Detective Supervisor Harkness.”
As he reached out to shake the commissioner’s hand, Harkness realized that his career as a cop had just taken an unexpected turn.
After circling most of downtown, the SUV hurtled up Storrow Drive, wound past North Station, and slid to a stop behind Harkness’s unmarked car. “One last thing, Harkness.”
“Yes, sir?” Harkness hoped the commissioner couldn’t tell that DeFrancesco was asleep.
“You’ll be running the show.”
***
Harkness pushes the coin transfer unit down Main Street, stopping to send coins gushing down into its metal belly like a slot machine paying off for someone else.
It’s enough to make even the straightest arrow go bent.
As he walks from meter to meter, Harkness asks the question he turns over in his mind every day like a riddle—will he ever get back to Narco-Intel? Maybe the wheels are grinding slowly, like the captain claims. Or maybe the commissioner just wants him to stay here in Nagog, out of trouble and off the front page. Forever.
Harkness moves on to the next meter. He doesn’t have the patience of Job. Far from it. His days of emptying meters are full of second-guessing and unanswered questions, revisiting the incident, guilt multiplying like compound interest. Now his missing gun joins his ledger of loss. Harkness zips his leather jacket against the cooling fall afternoon, careful to keep it over his holster, freed of its hard, deadly weight, replaced by an absurd toy.
Glock 17. Glock 17. Glock 17. His mind keeps sending out a relentless text message to the world. Harkness revisits every inch of the gritty path from Thalia’s loft to the donkey gas station—sidewalk, rusty bridge over the railway tracks, intersection, parking lot, smoky store—and wonders when his gun left its holster.
Three cups of coffee and an hour of cold air have started to clear his head. But the lost time after midnight remains surreal and confused. He thinks he remembers being in the store, or is he just remembering the security tape? Was he just drunk, or drugged? Though last night remains a mystery, the hard fact remains—his gun is gone.
A river of handguns runs through the land—street nines with rusty grips, fancy suburban SIGs in bedroom drawers waiting for home invasions that never happen, semiautomatics in the hands of fanatics and haters. Harkness has to keep his Glock 17 from falling into that steel-cold water.
He slams the heel of his hand into meter no. 347 over and over until its plastic window cracks and the read-out blinks METER OUT OF ORDER. There’s a brief moment of triumph when smashing something, anything. Then Harkness feels guilty for making more work for Stu, the town repairman. Harkness knows his meters the way plumbers know wrenches. Doesn’t make sense to beat up on the tools of your trade.
He moves on.
A few meters later, there’s a jam. He reaches for the pair of needle-nose pliers that live in his jacket pocket with the pepper spray. He’s never used the spray; dogs like Harkness as much as people do. But the pliers are out every day, pulling out nails, wire, straws, euros, toothpicks, gum wrappers. In August, some smart kid squirted Super Glue down the coin slots of every meter on Central Street.
There’s just not that much to do in Nagog.
He fishes a bent paper clip from the coin slot, clicks the ejector knob, and the meter’s fine again—a small problem solved. But the big one remains.
Harkness is already imagining the worst-case scenario—his gun ends up with some gangbanger
who uses it to kill a rival. Or worse, a cop. He presses his forehead on the cool metal of a meter. His father, Edward “Red” Harkness, who found himself in trouble and under fire more than once, used to say there are no atheists in foxholes. Harkness begins to pray.
Please do not let my gun kill anyone. Please help me find my gun.
“Excuse me?”
Harkness opens his eyes. An older woman in a tan fleece vest stands on the sidewalk. She’s holding out a coin purse.
“Change for the meter?” The woman shakes the purse to show that it’s empty. She’s about fifty, wearing jeans and sturdy shoes. Driving a sensible green Subaru. She looks like she just came back from a long, meditative walk in the town forest.
She waves a dollar like a limp flag.
“Can’t make change.” Harkness moves on to the next meter.
“But you have that whole thing full of it.” The woman points at the coin transfer unit, big as a kitchen trashcan. “Must be plenty of quarters in there.”
Harkness flicks the one-way steel door where the change falls in. “Can’t get to the coins.”
She squints. “Why not?”
“That’s the way it works.”
“So am I going to get a ticket?”
“I don’t know,” Harkness says. “I don’t write the tickets. Just empty the meters.”
She stares. “Why?”
It’s a question Harkness asks himself all day. “Because it’s my job.”
She tilts her head slightly. “I know you, don’t I?”
“Probably, ma’am.”
“Eddy? Eddy Harkness?”
“Yes?” He looks at the woman more carefully and recognizes her. “Mrs. P?”
“Thought it was you.” She throws her arms around him. “Eddy!”
“Been a long time, Mrs. P.” The close, warm smell of the classrooms, Mrs. Pettengill at the chalkboard beneath the cursive alphabet chart, the green-tiled hallways of Nagog Elementary—it all comes back.