Third Rail

by Rory Flynn

  The captain leans forward. “I’ll get Detective Ramble on the case.”

  Harkness shakes his head. “No offense, sir. But I’d like your permission to check it out myself.”

  “So how dangerous is this . . . Rail Yard or whatever it’s called?”

  “Seems kind of unpredictable,” Harkness says. “Makes people lose it. Checked online on some gray market drug sites, did a Narco-Intel database search, been e-mailing someone who’s writing a book about smart drugs. Not a lot of intel on Third Rail.”

  The captain pauses. “You have two weeks to find out more. That’s it.”

  Harkness smiles. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Report anything you find directly to me. Don’t mention this to anyone else. And do not, I repeat, do not, do anything to put anyone in danger. That includes you. We’ll pull in the State Police or the DEA if it gets serious.”

  Harkness nods.

  “Got to keep you safe,” he says. “You’ll be heading back to Boston soon.”

  Harkness scans Captain Munro’s creased face, looking for some sign that he’s lying. He sees nothing but the captain’s clear blue eyes.

  14

  THEY’RE DRINKING WHISKEY at McCloskey’s, crowded with neon-tanned men with XXL Patriots jerseys draped over beer bellies, whiskey-botched women in velour sweatpants. The dim light does everyone small favors.

  “You know that politician guy, Fitzgerald?” Thalia says. “The one you were talking about?” She’s shouting over the Sox game on the flat-screen behind the bar.

  “Yeah?”

  “I think he used to come by Mach’s. Looked like him anyway.”

  “For drugs?”

  “No.”

  “Girls?”

  Thalia shakes her head. “Liked to hang with the big boys after hours.” Thalia stirs her drink with a tiny straw made for sipping, which she’s not.

  “What big boys?”

  Thalia shrugs. “The usual crooks. Old-style Irish mob guys, mostly.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Wasn’t sure this guy was Fitzgerald. Googled him. Still can’t tell. Not exactly an original look around the Zero Room—sausage-colored and vicious.”

  “Can you find out if it was Fitzgerald?”

  “There’s a guy I can call. Name’s Jeet. Worked the back bar, where all the crazy shit happened. Liked to take pictures. Called them his insurance policy.”

  “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “Everyone at Mach’s was working some angle.”

  Harkness sees a glimmer in Thalia’s eyes. “Even you?”

  She gives him a steady stare. “I stole a couple big bags of frozen tiger shrimp from the downstairs freezer once.”

  “Were they good?”

  Thalia shrugs. “Not really.”

  “Anything else you want to tell me about?”

  “Cut it out, Eddy. No more interro-fucking-gations. I’m your girlfriend, ’member?” She pulls him toward her. “I’d do anything for you.” Whiskey burns on her hot breath and her voice drops. “I’d kill for you, Eddy.”

  “For now, just call Jeet.”

  The TV catches her eye and she points. “Game’s moving really fast.”

  “It’s the season recap, Thalia.”

  “Right. Sox lost big. Thanks to you, Eddy.” On cue, the camera zeroes in on a pinstriped Yankees fan smiling maniacally and waving a handwritten sign that says THE CURSE IS WORSE!

  Harkness feels a little worse, too.

  “You know, if Pauley Fitzgerald hadn’t been wearing a Sox jersey when they dropped him down onto the Pike—”

  “I think I get why you majored in history, Harvard Cop,” Thalia says. “You’re always . . . living in the past.” Thalia waves to the bartender to order another whiskey, then weaves toward the ladies’ room.

  The past points the way forward. Red Harkness told him this once about market conditions, which he ignored for his uniquely larcenous approach to investing. But using this rare paternal insight, Harkness can predict how this night’s going to end. He and Thalia will move on to Franklin’s or another dump and drink until two in the morning, then head back to her loft to thrash around on the futon. Harkness will wake up in the middle of the night, sure that something’s very wrong, like a bad diagnosis that slipped his mind. Then he’ll remember his gun is still missing and he’s not any closer to getting it back.

  Harkness takes a look around McCloskey’s. Along the front bar sit the lost, who made some bad bets or had a run-in with heartbreak or their parole officers. They drink to kill time until the smoke clears from their lives. At the back tables sit the gone, dead-eyed drinkers trapped in amber bar light. They quit waiting for their luck to change a long time ago. They’d be nihilists if they knew what it meant.

  Harkness reminds himself not to come around here again. He’s not disappointed or lost. He’s just stuck in a circle of bad luck. And he’s about to break free—he’s sure of it.

  Everyone is.

  His phone rings. He checks it to fend off another Pauley Fitz call. But it’s Patrick.

  Harkness walks toward the door and stands outside the bar, leaning against a brick wall, still warm from the afternoon sun.

  “What do you have?”

  “Is that the way you say hello to your friends now?” Patrick’s voice sounds far away.

  “Sorry. Kind of in a bind, Patrick. Girlfriend’s getting strange on me.”

  “Hate that. Hey, the Dex guy you asked me to check out? There’s nothing on him. Clean sheet. No priors. Files his taxes on time. Two years at MIT, then he dropped out, just like you thought. No debt. Paid cash for his house in your lily-white town of Nagog.”

  Harkness looks back in the bar. Thalia’s meandering back from the ladies’ room, looking for him. She’s morphed into a bleary photo of herself with her eyes scratched out. “Thanks. Got to go. One last request.”

  “Usually people make those when they’re about to die, Eddy.”

  Harkness doesn’t laugh. “I need you to hack Pauley Fitzgerald’s cell account and find out who’s paying the bill. Or better yet, get a fix on where the phone is.”

  “No can do, Harky,” Patrick says. “You’re going to have to do your own dirty work. We’re getting the stink eye from the commissioner and his chums. Got a full-time Internal Affairs guy camped out in the next office. Not allowed to do anything freelance.”

  “Since when did we start doing everything by the book?”

  “Since you left, Harky.” Patrick clicks his phone off.

  ***

  The dead girl wears a red and white Nagog High Minutemen uniform. The EMTs found Kelly Pierce face down next to the thin woods that surround the track. The impact sheared back a hand-sized patch of her scalp and bashed in a piece of her skull, seeping yellow cranial fluid. Blood slicks her left side all the way down to her running shoes.

  The runner’s body is stiff, back arched. She’s been lying on the edge of the woods all night.

  Her shoes look too big to Harkness, track uniform too tight.

  He steps back and the EMT loads the runner’s body onto a stretcher and pushes her across the bumpy grass to the parking lot.

  “Crazy, huh?” Watt says. “Girl runs off the track and into the woods. Smacks her head the wrong way and breaks her neck.”

  “That’s the story they’re telling, is it?”

  “That’s what Dabilis said.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Dealing with the EMTs and the principal. Taking notes for the report.”

  “That’ll be interesting,” Harkness says. “Bet they say it’s an accident.”

  “Plenty of those lately,” Watt says.

  “They want to keep the stats low. Accidents are okay. Anything worse starts messing with the real estate values,” Harkness says.

  Watt looks at him like he just said something in French. “That true?”

  “Yeah, it is.” He hands Watt some evidence bags and a mar
ker. “Hey. Help me out for a minute.”

  “Dabilis is investigating this one,” Watt says. “Told me just to keep people off the field.”

  “We’ll help him out,” Harkness says. “C’mon.”

  They walk side by side for a moment, eyes down and scanning the ground. Harkness reaches down to pluck a scrap of black cloth from the browning grass and seals it in a bag. He writes the date, time, and location on the bag. Then scrawls his name and badge number with a Sharpie.

  “Hey, here’s another one.” Watt leans down to pick up another piece of cloth, then another. He stuffs them in separate bags. “All about the same length.”

  Harkness looks at the pieces of cloth, some dark, some sun faded, edges unraveling. “Come here for a second.” Harkness reaches out to tie one of the pieces of fabric around Watt’s forehead. It fits perfectly with a couple of knots in the back. “Can you see anything?”

  “No.”

  Harkness unties the blindfold and they walk on. Harkness imagines the girl surrounded by a crowd of friends or enemies—it isn’t clear yet. But the trampled grass says the dead runner wasn’t alone.

  He imagines her body on the ground in the twilight, blood gushing from her head wound. Anyone with her would want to get rid of any evidence fast. The short grass stretches out like hotel carpet, unable to hide anything. He turns toward the woods, ground thick with leaves and pine needles.

  “In here.” Harkness leads Watt into the woods. The young pines, the width of a fireplace log, are planted in a careful grid. They choose two rows and start walking.

  “What’re we looking for, Eddy?”

  “Anything that shouldn’t be here.”

  “We shouldn’t be here.”

  Harkness stops at the end of a row, takes a pen out of his pocket, and kneels down on the pine needles. The empty amber vial rests on its side. He slides the pen into its mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “Trouble,” Harkness says.

  Watt holds out an open evidence bag and Harkness drops it in.

  When they walk out of the woods Sergeant Dabilis is waiting. “Did you ladies have a nice walk in the woods?” He gives them a tight smile.

  Watt holds out the bags.

  “Souvenirs?” Dabilis takes the bags. “My scene. My investigation. Get going.”

  “Found something you should see.” Watt points to the vial.

  “Looks like something from the science lab,” Dabilis says. “Let me guess. There were probably some beer cans and empty vodka nips in the woods, too, right? Maybe a couple of condoms?”

  “Didn’t see any, sir,” Watt says.

  “Like I said before, this is my accident scene. Clear out now. Both of you.”

  Harkness watches the tiny dots of sweat on the oyster-colored skin below Dabilis’s eyes.

  “Looks kind of sketchy to me, sir,” Watt says.

  “Don’t try to go all CSI on us, Forty Watt,” Dabilis says. “It was an accident. The victim was putting in some extra laps last night after the rest of the team left. She ran off the track. Maybe it got too dark. Or she had a seizure. Then she hit her head on a tree. Tragic. Talked to the school nurse. Kelly Pierce was on all kinds of meds.”

  “I talked to some of the kids,” Watt said. “Said she was a nice girl. Really smart. Everyone liked her—they’re crying their eyes out in the parking lot. Here’s the weirdest thing.”

  “What’s that?” Dabilis says.

  “She wasn’t on the track team.”

  15

  THE FIRST TWO DOZEN oysters disappear so fast that even their tired waitress seems impressed.

  “Another dozen?” Harkness asks.

  “Sure.” A plaque over the bar at the Union Oyster House tells the tourists that Daniel Webster used to down a few dozen oysters and several flagons of brandy in an afternoon. Jeet seems to be trying to beat him. Or at least run their lunch tab into the triple digits. Harkness is paying.

  “Haven’t been here in years.” Jeet’s working on a second bowl of chowder, splashing the lobster bib he’s tied over his black T-shirt.

  “Used to come here all the time.” Harkness likes the tall, wood-walled booths near the bar, public confessionals, perfect for meeting with sources. Back when he ran Narco-Intel, Harkness might be sitting in the same booth with a street dealer ready to roll on his friends or a cokehead accused of setting fires in Back Bay alleys. But Harkness doesn’t tell that to the man Thalia called the brother she never had.

  Jeet eyes the tray of oysters when it arrives. “Same again when you have a chance,” he says to the waitress before even tasting them. She smiles. Waitresses love a hungry customer, even a guy with a retro-punk brush-cut bright blue Mohawk and a T-shirt with I USED TO CARE on the front and BUT NOW I TAKE A PILL FOR THAT on the back.

  “Saw you around Mach’s sometimes, talking to Thalia,” he says. “You’re that Harvard Cop guy, right?”

  Harkness puts an empty oyster shell upside down on the ice. “Right.”

  “She’s a beaut, Thalia,” Jeet says, with a look that’s not at all brotherly. “Sassy lassie with a nice little assy. That’s what we used to call her. Didn’t put up with shit from anyone, not even Mach. Got your hands full, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But we’re not here to talk about Thalia, are we?”

  “No, we’re not,” Harkness says. “I need your help.”

  “I guess you’re not talking about the oysters. Because I’m doing my part.”

  “I’m talking about your old boss.”

  Jeet holds up his hands. “Got nothing to do with Mach anymore. Kinda fascinated by the guy, but he is, at the end of the day, a charming psychopath.”

  “Thalia says you’re a photographer.”

  He shrugs. “Sure, I take pictures.”

  “Like what kind?”

  “Friend of mine worked at a gallery on Newbury Street back in the day. Showed me Mapplethorpe’s X portfolio one night. Know what I’m talking about?”

  “Bullwhips and butts, not calla lilies and light, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Got me interested in the dark stuff. Shit people can’t believe is real.”

  The waitress brings Jeet another beer and for the next ten minutes, he drinks and reels out his take on street photography, from Bellocq to Larry Clark. Harkness thinks Jeet may be high. He’s getting kind of wound up about the whole subject.

  “What about the Zero Room?”

  Jeet looks up at the ceiling. “That place is a scumbag hall of fame. Guys waltz in, politicians you see on the news acting all straight and shit, talking family values blah-blah-blah, and at about three in the morning, they’re drunk and snorting cocaine out of some girl’s ass crack. Or worse.”

  “Ordering off of the special menu?”

  He nods. “Exactly.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I was making piles of money, off the books, of course. And I took pictures with my Minox after hours when everyone was too drunk to notice.”

  “Drugs and girls?”

  “Sure, plenty of that,” Jeet says. “But some other things, too, things more in line with what you’re looking for.”

  Something hits his knee.

  “Take it, Eddy.” Jeet’s handing him a cardboard box underneath the table.

  Harkness nods, puts the box on the bench next to him. “What’s in it?”

  “Take a gander.” Jeet shakes his head. “My life’s work comes down to a stack of pictures of a bunch of politicians and criminals.”

  “That distinction is debatable around here,” Harkness says. “What do you want for the photos, Jeet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Thalia told me what you’re looking for. Fitzgerald was a regular back in the day. I hear he’s running for mayor, God help us. This guy isn’t your normal crooked politician, Eddy. He’s ruthless, like some kind of virus. He’ll do absolutely anything to be mayor.”

  “Wh
at was he doing at Mach’s place?”

  Jeet shrugs. “Mach can deliver a lot of votes. And pull a lot of strings. And we’re not talking League of Women Voters. Check it out.”

  Harkness lifts the lid and flips through the photos, recognizing the familiar back room of the Zero Room. Fitzgerald sits with a smiling Mr. Mach and assorted bargirls. Then he comes across a photo so unexpected and strange that he can only stare in awe.

  “These are real?”

  Jeet nods.

  “Is that who I think it is with Fitzgerald?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “When did you take this?”

  “The time stamp’s printed right on it. Years ago. Back when he was supposed to be on the run.”

  Harkness squints at the photo in the dim booth. “Unbelievable.”

  “Well, you can definitely believe it, because I was there,” Jeet says. “I call it The Last Supper, Boston Mob Edition.”

  “Why would Fitzgerald do something so risky?”

  “Oldest reason in the world. Money. His fucking brother works in the FBI’s Boston office. Fitzgerald passed along news about the feds in exchange for a suitcase full of cash. Probably the money that got his campaign going. Like Kickstarter for crooks.”

  Harkness closes the lid and holds it down with his thumbs, as if the photos might escape.

  Jeet shrugs. “You know how it is. Every thug around here likes to have a politician as their wingman. And the other way around.”

  “Does Fitzgerald still go to Mach’s?”

  Jeet shakes his head. “No way. He’s all corporate now. Romney-fied. But dirt has a way of getting dirtier.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “And if Fitzgerald gets elected mayor, the whole city’s fucked. It’ll be a crony fest like Boston’s never seen before. And this guy’s cronies are even worse than he is. Trust me.”

  Harkness looks into Jeet’s jittery eyes. “Why should I?”

  “I’m Thalia’s friend.” Jeet leans forward. “Look, Eddy. I’m not Mapplethorpe. I’m not even Wee-fucking-gee. I was just a smart-ass bartender sneaking pictures when I should have been stopping all the crap that was going on. And still is. That’s why I’m here.”

  “They’re going to know where the photos came from, you know that, don’t you? They’ll come after you.”