Third Rail

by Rory Flynn

  “We have to help him,” someone says. The small crowd shares the solemn but confused look of do-gooders not sure how to do good.

  “Look, the animal control officer is on his way,” Harkness says. The protocol is to wait. But no one should have to watch an animal suffer. Best to clear people away. “Step back. Get back in your cars, please.”

  The door of a Toyota pickup opens and the driver strides toward Harkness. Leather tool belt, big boots, greasy Carhartt jacket—he looks like a carpenter from the Cape.

  “Just shoot that buck,” he says, voice loud and flat. “Gonna die in the woods anyway.”

  “The animal control officer is on his way,” Harkness says. “Please step back into your truck, sir.”

  “It’s in pain. Why make it last longer?” The carpenter points at Harkness’s plastic gun. “Just shoot it.”

  If he had a real gun, Harkness would have by now. But firing colorful disks over the dying deer doesn’t seem helpful. He scopes the carpenter out. He seems like an ordinary guy, the kind who obeys cops. “We’re waiting, understand, sir?”

  “Look, dude. I’m a hunter. If I had my gear in the truck I’d just shoot it for you.”

  The crowd murmurs. They want to be humane, but they’re not sure about just shooting the deer, which would involve death. As a rule, the town of Nagog is opposed to death. A few weeks ago someone asked Harkness to rescue a spider trapped inside a parking meter.

  The buck rises up on his front legs and gives out a terrified bleat. He collapses on the road with a thud, black tongue lolling, flanks heaving.

  “For Christ’s sake, shoot him!” The carpenter stomps back to his truck.

  “The rest of you, get in your cars, please,” Harkness says. They start to shuffle to their Subarus and Hondas. Then the carpenter comes back carrying a sledgehammer.

  “You. Stop.” Because Harkness looks and sounds like a cop, the carpenter does.

  Harkness points at the crowd. “All of you. In your cars, now.” They trudge away.

  A car drives up behind him and Harkness turns to see the brown sedan with the green TOWN OF NAGOG seal on the side. Hank Steadman, the town’s gruff, incompetent animal control officer, walks toward Harkness, holding a tranquilizer gun sloppily at his side.

  Behind him, Harkness hears a fleshy smash and then another. When he turns, the carpenter is swinging his hammer at the buck’s head like it’s a reluctant two-by-four. There’s a crack when he hits the buck’s skull and the deer shudders once, legs trying to run one last time. Then the buck goes still.

  “There’s your fucking animal control.” He wipes the sledge on the grass and stalks back toward his truck, shaking his head.

  Hank ambles closer. “Looks like you got a dead deer here, Eddy.”

  Harkness nods. The buck’s black eyes are open and staring, his crushed skull oozing dark blood.

  “Grab a leg and we’ll get him off the road.”

  8

  HARKNESS PULLS INTO THE EMPTY PARKING LOT of Nagog Regional Hospital. There’s a banner announcing a blood drive, an empty guard shack, and a couple of old men in tan raincoats shuffling outside the Pavilion, the town’s elder care facility. Harkness calls the familiar number.

  “Sir!”

  “Patrick, it’s me.”

  “Thanks for that information, sir!”

  “Someone’s in your office, right?” Harkness isn’t supposed to call Narco-Intel.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Call back when you can.”

  Harkness clicks his phone off and sits in the quiet squad car for a moment. Through the rain-speckled windshield, he can see the semicircle drive that leads to the emergency room—a longtime Harkness family haunt. He remembers going there at seven when his brother George pushed him out of a tree. When they were twelve, they walked deep into the Nagog Woods and shot each other at fifty yards to see if the pellets would break skin. They did. At sixteen, he and George both ended up in the ER when they smashed their father’s BMW into a cement wall to see if the airbags would inflate. They didn’t. In high school, George taught his punk brother how to make a pipe bomb in the basement. They learned to make do without eyebrows.

  Their father, Edward “Red” Harkness, took a perverse pride in his rough sons, their fights, and the trips to the emergency room. Red had a few visits of his own, stabbing himself in the thigh while drinking Scotch and opening Wellfleet oysters with a barlow knife, an anxiety attack triggered by a market drop, and a holiday overdose of Demerol that left him sprawled on the living room floor, pale and unresponsive as a birch log.

  It’s only funny when someone gets hurt. Like many a truth, the Harkness family motto makes more sense in retrospect. Eddy and George, with encouragement from their father, fought until blood flowed from somewhere—nose, mouth, scalp. They carried violence inside them like a banked fire. They still do.

  His phone rings.

  “Harky?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Got some news for you.”

  “Good or bad?”

  Patrick says nothing.

  “Out with it.”

  “Well, that check I ran on Thalia Havoc came up completely clean. But when I ran Thalia Prochazka, I found out your girl’s been busy.”

  “Like what?”

  “Drug busts. Junk twice. Blow once. All under a gram. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

  “What kind of weapon?”

  “Dinner plate. Threw it at someone at some Chinatown dump. And breaking and entering. Broke into the Public Garden at night and took a Swan Boat for a spin back when she was in art school.”

  Harkness has to smile at that one.

  “Girl’s a pistol.”

  “Roger that,” Harkness says. “What about the call from Pauley Fitz?”

  “Someone’s got his cell phone.”

  “That’s weird. Didn’t it get smashed?”

  “He dropped it on the bridge. Ended up in Evidence downtown.”

  “So a cop took it?”

  “Maybe, Harky. All I know is Pauley Fitz’s phone is missing and no one signed it out.”

  “Weird.” Harkness sits in the quiet car for a moment, staring at the gray cement hospital.

  “Looks like someone’s got it in for you, Harky. All we got to do is figure out who.”

  “That’s always the hard part,” Harkness says.

  “I’ll help you.”

  “I know that,” Harkness says. “Got to go.”

  “Meters?”

  “No. Heading to the hospital to bother a drunk driver who’s about to die.”

  “You get to have all the fun,” Patrick says. “Listen, I got some other bad news.”

  “How bad?”

  “Real bad. Watch-your-back bad. Leave-town-at-high-speed bad.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Can’t tell you now, Eddy. Didn’t exactly find out via normal channels. Come downtown and we’ll talk.”

  The mound is covered by sheets and blankets, woven with tubes and wires, and surrounded by pulsing monitors no one seems to notice. Harkness can’t imagine that it’s human or alive. From the door of the blazingly bright ICU, he watches the doctors and nurses connecting tubes and setting up equipment. Their hushed, urgent voices make it obvious that Robert Hammond isn’t going to be walking out of Nagog Regional any time soon.

  “Can I help you?” A young male nurse with his dark hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail turns toward Harkness.

  Harkness takes off his hat and gives the nurse his cop look—serious, concerned, and honest. “I’m here to ask Mr. Hammond a few questions.”

  “I don’t think he’s got much to say. We’re pumping him full of drugs.” The nurse squints at Harkness’s badge. “Eddy, right? Eddy Harkness. Nagog High?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s me, Andy Singh.” The nurse points at his narrow chest beneath baby-blue scrubs.

  Harkness digs back through his high school memories. “Right. Hi, Andy
.” While Harkness was at the Academy, on street patrols in Boston, and with Narco-Intel, his high school classmates turned into townies.

  They shake hands and the nurse leads Harkness a couple of yards away from Hammond.

  “You were on the baseball team,” Andy Singh says. “And you were into music, right? I was in a band. The Andy Singh Experience?”

  Harkness remembers a band of shoegazers in the sun at Nagog High’s spring music fest. “Guitar, right? Still playing?”

  Andy shakes his head. “No. Too busy. Besides, I got way into drugs in college. Had to give up on music. Found a program. Stuck with it. Cleaned up.”

  “Good. Good for you.” Harkness gives him the hard look and Andy’s eyes drift. When people say they’ve straightened out, they probably haven’t. Odds are Andy has some weed or a pill hoard tucked away in his locker.

  “Now I’m working at a hospital. Surrounded by all kinds of drugs. Weird, huh? How things change.”

  “Weirder if they didn’t.” Harkness looks back at the mound. “Is this guy going to make it?”

  “Probably not,” Andy says. “But you never know.”

  “Injuries?”

  “Broken arm, cracked pelvis, punctured lung, lots of internal stuff, toxemia.” Andy holds out his hands about a foot apart. “Going to have to take out a big chunk of his liver. Luckily his is the size of Tay-hass. Some cranial trauma. Brain’s loose.”

  “Sounds bad.”

  “Ought to be dead already. Scrawny little dudes speeding on prom night? They die in wrecks like this. Puffy guys, wedged in their Volvos, it’s like they’re driving around with extra airbags made out of fat.”

  “He was drunk at the time of the accident, yes?”

  Andy leans forward. “Officially, I’m not supposed to say anything.” He flips back a few pages on his clipboard. “But, yeah, when he was admitted his blood alcohol was .23, like three times over the limit. That probably helped him, too.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He didn’t clench up on impact. He was all loosey-goosey.”

  “So being totally drunk and morbidly obese helped save his life,” Harkness says.

  “Worked out that way for him, I guess.”

  “Any indication that he was trying to kill himself?”

  Andy tilts his head.

  “Just trying to assess his . . . state of mind.”

  “Let me take a look.” Andy glances back toward the doctors, then goes through the chart and reads. “Patient was confused, difficult to control, convinced that he had been in a plane crash.”

  “That’s strange.”

  “Not as weird as some of the shit we see in here, Eddy. Preppie girls with infected cuts up and down their legs. Lawyers with eggplants stuck in their butts. Bankers overdosed on animal tranquilizers from their daughters’ horses. The other day some guy tried to poison his wife with antifreeze in her skinny-girl mojito. This town seems all normal but it’s not, Eddy.”

  ***

  “Who loves him some Bambi?” the Sweathog says, smiling.

  Harkness slips by Sergeant Dabilis but the sergeant follows him across the Pit.

  “Couldn’t even shoot a deer, could you?”

  Harkness says nothing, fills the coffeemaker with water. The other cops look up, sensing a new episode of Harvard Cop versus the Sweathog.

  “You’re not supposed to shoot a deer,” Officer Watt says. “I looked it up. Harkness had it right. You wait for Animal Control. Too dangerous to fire off a shot with people around.”

  Harkness likes Watt, a slow-talking rookie, a little more now.

  “Well, I’d have shot the fucker,” the Sweathog says. “Public menace. You can use deadly force if it’s endangering people.”

  “The deer was down with two broken legs,” Watt says.

  “Still ought to have shot the fucker, instead of letting some jack-off citizen do your dirty work with a fucking hammer.”

  Harkness says nothing.

  “If you’re not going to use that gun, maybe we should just take it away from you,” Sergeant Dabilis says.

  Harkness freezes.

  “I don’t think those parking meters pose much of a threat.”

  Harkness grabs Sergeant Dabilis by the shoulders, lifts him off his feet, and slams him against a row of filing cabinets—all so fast neither of them has time to think. Harkness holds Dabilis pressed against the wall like an insect specimen, then forces himself to let the Sweathog slide down, his coffee spilling on the floor. Harkness walks away, arms vibrating, mind spinning.

  “Hey, I’m reporting that!”

  The normal cops tell the Sweathog to cut it out, that he was asking for it. They like Harkness. And cops are superstitious. Someday they might make a tough call and end up on perpetual meter duty.

  The captain steps out of his office and frowns. “Get back to work, people. Dabilis, clean up that coffee and get back to your desk. Watt, I want you in your patrol car in ten seconds. Harkness, I need to see you in my office. Now.”

  The captain leafs through papers on his desk with a brutal efficiency, not even looking up when Harkness walks in. He knows there’s only one explanation for the captain’s coldness; his gun turned up, its serial number traced. He’s played out the inevitable ending, where he sets his badge on the desk as the captain looks away in disappointment.

  “The town manager’s been on the phone with me about a dozen times already,” the captain shouts, finally. When he’s pissed, the captain’s Scottish accent comes out, his cheeks redden, and he loses some of his cool. “The historical commission’s got its collective tit in a wringer. I’ve been fielding calls all day.”

  Harkness nods. Small-town politics, he can deal with today.

  “Some people want to tear the rest of the monument down because it glorifies war. The rest want to rebuild it immediately because it ‘honors the sacrifice of our nation’s heroes.’ Do you know how much it’s going to cost to fix?”

  Harkness shrugs.

  “Almost a million dollars.” The captain shakes his head. He’s a Scot by birth and a Yankee for twenty years, giving him a double dose of thrift.

  “Ouch.”

  “No one knows how to do stonework like that anymore. Have to quarry new granite in New Hampshire and make it look old. And bring in a repair team from Italy. That drunk asshole, excuse my language, intoxicated citizen, triggered a colonial clusterfuck. What did you find out at the hospital?”

  “Hammond was definitely drunk at the time of the accident, blowing .23.”

  “Impressive. Sounds like a pro.”

  “Now he’s a mess.”

  “Did he say anything about his motivation? Trying to kill himself?”

  “He was out cold, sir. He’s dying. Won’t be long.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’m heading back to the hospital. Want to see if his daughter shows up.”

  “Excellent. Get her to sign this.” He hands Harkness a piece of paper.

  “What is it?”

  “Official acceptance of responsibility for the damage. He can sign if he ever wakes up. Or his daughter can, if she’s authorized.”

  Harkness folds the piece of paper and puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “And Harkness?”

  He pauses at the door. “Yes, sir?”

  “You were right to hold your fire. With the deer, I mean.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “This is a quiet town. We don’t need patrolmen blasting away on our streets.”

  Harkness keeps the truth to himself. Couldn’t blast away even if I wanted to.

  9

  BACK IN HIGH SCHOOL, you turned me on to all the coolest old bands—Mission of Burma, SS Decontrol, Flipper, Misfits, Avengers. You were like a punk historian. Straight Ed. Coolest straight guy at Nagog High.” Candace Hammond reaches over to peer down at her baby, nestled in the car seat next to her. “Used to see you running all those wild all-ages shows. Now you’re a cop. Amazing.” />
  “Not really,” Harkness says.

  “I guess being a cop is kind of hardcore, when you think about it.” Her silver bracelets jangle and her baby makes a snuffling sound. “I can’t believe you’re still around here,” she says. “Thought you’d go to New York for sure.”

  Harkness shrugs. Everyone always expects something else.

  “Anyway, I’m glad to see you again.” She looks around the hospital cafeteria, quiet in a midafternoon lull. “Even if it’s when my dad’s about to check out.” Candace blinks her coffee-colored eyes. “No. Not going to cry. He’s not dead.” She shakes her head, as if it might wake her from this bad dream set in a hospital basement smelling of French fries and hand sanitizer.

  Tendrils of black hair streaked platinum frame Candace’s delicate, pale face. She’s as street tough as a Nagog girl can be—bright red lipstick, dark mascara, and a tiny silver nose ring. But her frightened eyes, gleaming and red rimmed, tell another story.

  “This really isn’t the right time,” he says. “But I have to ask you a few questions.”

  She gives him a hard stare. “I can’t talk about Dad.”

  “Look, I know this is hard.”

  “You have no idea.”

  Harkness says nothing, the oldest tactic in the world. It takes about ten seconds to work.

  “Here’s all you need to know about dear old Dad.” Candace counts off her father’s salient qualities on her ringed fingers. “He’s a big shot who is, in fact, up to his eyeballs in debt. He’s fat as a whale. He drinks all the time. And he’s a major asshole. Kicked me out of the family McMansion five years ago. I’m doing double shifts at the Nagog Bakery just to pay rent.”

  “I like that place.”

  “If you want a cup of coffee and an almond croissant, yes. If you want to make a living, no.”

  “When was the last time you saw your father?”

  “A couple of weeks ago, when we took the baby over for a visit.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Declan, May’s father.”

  “How’d your dad seem to be doing?”

  “No idea. We were there for about ten minutes. Dad can’t stand Dex.”

  “Why not?”