Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  After the Thaw

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from Rory Flynn

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Rory Flynn

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Flynn, Rory, (date) author.

  Title: Dark horse : an Eddy Harkness novel / Rory Flynn.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. | Series: Eddy Harkness ; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037255 | ISBN 9780544253247 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544253155 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Police—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. | Drug traffic—Massachusetts—Boston—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.L92 D37 2016 |DDC813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037255

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  v1.0516

  For James Ryan

  Everybody’s got a little hole in the middle,

  Everybody does a little dance with the Devil.

  —EMILY JANE WHITE

  1

  DETECTIVE EDDY HARKNESS sweeps his hand along the inside of the windshield to clear the fog and searches for stragglers or thrill-seekers. He finds only dark ­windows, empty sidewalks, and street signs shaking in the wind. ­Albrecht Street is already a raging river and the emerald sky dumps more water by the minute. Cardboard boxes and suitcases, lost during the frantic evacuation, circle in the brown water, rising fast now that the sewers have given up.

  Harkness slows the squad car to keep the engine from flooding.

  “No one left, Harky,” Patrick says. “Whole neighborhood’s empty. Everybody’s gone, like they’re s’post to be.”

  A roiling clump of brown fur and glinting eyes swims past. “Except the rats.”

  “Bad sign when the rats start leaving, right?”

  “Oh yeah.” Harkness keeps the squad car moving so they can finish the last blocks of the neighborhood check and head back to Narco-Intel.

  Just before dawn, a weakening tropical storm meandering off the coast of Rhode Island hit a wall of cold air and turned ambitious. The winds ramped up to hurricane force and the storm took an unexpected jag northwest. The National Weather Service didn’t even have time to name it. Now Hurricane X churns over the North Atlantic, about to make landfall near Boston. Mayor O’Mara shut down the airport, trains, and trolleys. He ordered all citizens to shelter in place, evacuating only the Lower South End, protected from the storm surge by a rotting wood and earthen dam at the end of an abandoned industrial canal. If the Channel Dam gives way, the rising waters of Boston Harbor will sweep through Albrecht Square, empty now.

  Almost empty.

  A gunshot echoes over the frantic windshield wipers and the drumming rain. Harkness pulls the squad car to the curb.

  “S’post to be a drive-by,” Patrick says.

  “Yeah?”

  “So keep driving by, boss. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Can’t pretend you didn’t hear that.”

  “Hear what?”

  Another gunshot cracks above them.

  Harkness stares into the darting eyes of his partner, so much happier back in Dataland than out on the street. “So what was that?”

  “Some yahoo exercising his Second Amendment rights?” Patrick holds up his hands. “Let it slide, Harky. For once.”

  Harkness shoulders open the door, and trash-laden brown water swirls into the patrol car. He picks up a crowbar from the floor and steps out into the knee-deep river raging down the street. “C’mon.”

  “Gross.” Patrick squeezes his eyes closed and opens his door. He trudges through the cold water to the sidewalk and climbs up on a lamppost base. The wind rips back their orange raincoats, and rain soaks their uniforms. “So we gonna go door to door,” Patrick shouts, “all community-outreach-like?”

  Harkness nods, eyes almost closed against the rain, dark hair whipping across his face.

  “We don’t even know where those shots are coming from, Harky.”

  Another shot sends glass raining down on the sidewalk from a hotel’s top-floor window.

  Patrick just shakes his head.

  “Let’s go.” Harkness rushes to the front of the building—door locked, entryway clogged with bloated bundles of the Globe. Back when Harkness was a beat cop, a semi-recovered crackhead named Chai ran the Hotel Blackstone, more shabby than chic, where aspiring rockers, poets, and ill-informed European travelers rented rooms by the week. The coffee shop served piles of sweet potato fries that worked as reliable beer sponges. The maids and bellboys did a lucrative side business in short-term love. Now the Blackstone’s a drug-infested SRO nightmare that the city’s been trying to shut down for years.

  They pop open the door with the crowbar and step inside. A light flickers in the gloom from the empty desk clerk’s booth, where rows of plastic-tagged keys hang above an overturned red plastic chair. Harkness and Patrick follow a thin path where trudging footsteps have etched away a layer of grime across the lobby to reveal white tile.

  Harkness clicks his radio to call in, his “Investigating shots fired” lost among dozens of urgent reports from across the rain-soaked city. Cars are abandoned on flooded Storrow Drive. A power station just exploded and shut down the Back Bay. Looters are smashing boutique windows on Newbury Street.

  “Upstairs,” he says. They cross the lobby and climb the steps, the still air thick with the sharp smell of aging piss. At the top floor, Harkness counts the doors until they come to the center.

  Harkness nods Patrick toward the closer side of the door and he takes the other. They press their backs against the cracked yellow plaster.

  “Sure this is the right one?” Patrick whispers, still huffing from the stairs.

  A shot rips through the door between them and dim light filters through the splintered hole.

  “Seems likely.” On a normal patrol, they would have called for backup and waited. But this is no ordinary day. Harkness smacks the crowbar on the door. “Police,” he shouts. “Drop the gun and open the door, hands in the air. Now.”

  Another bullet cracks through the door.

  Patrick gives Harkness a flat stare, clicks his radio to leave the channel open, not that anyone’s paying attention. “Party time.”

  “Cover the door.” Harkness cuts down the hallway to the other wing of the hotel. He pops a door and it flies open to reveal a dim living room, empty except f
or a jumbled pile of bicycle frames. He walks slowly to the far corner of the room, where a row of windows faces an air shaft. He grabs a tattered green T-shirt from the floor and wipes the window to clear away the grime.

  Looking across the air shaft into the apartment, Harkness sees a young boy leaning against a radiator, tethered to it by a thick, shiny chain around his waist. He waves a gun with one hand and scratches his back with the other. Sensing someone watching, he turns. The boy can’t be more than fourteen but looks exhausted as an old man, eyelids drifting down as he stares at Harkness and wonders why there’s a cop in the empty room across the air shaft.

  They look at each other for a moment. Then the boy holds up his hand and lets the gun drop.

  Harkness nods, turns to retrace his steps.

  Patrick’s face glistens with sweat. “Harky, we got to get out of here, like now.”

  “Hang on.” Harkness kicks open the bullet-pocked door and they take cautious steps into the apartment. Guns drawn, they walk past a sagging couch and a wooden table crowded with bottles and cans. A flat-screen flickers in the corner, the Weather Channel showing clouds swirling and wind-whipped weathermen in slickers shouting silently. Patrick cuts right to check out the kitchen, Harkness left to the bedroom. No one lurks in the trashed rooms, narrow hallways, or closets. They reconnect and inch toward the living room, where the skinny boy stands next to a white radiator, a body sprawled on the floor a few feet away.

  “All clear. Just the kid.” Patrick holsters his Glock.

  “And a dead guy.” Harkness leads the way across the living room, tinted green by the storm’s aquatic light. The floor is thick with McDonald’s boxes, scratch tickets, and wadded clothes.

  The boy backs against the radiator.

  Patrick walks up to the body. “Shit, man. This sad motherfucker’s still warm.”

  “Check him out,” Harkness says. “I’ll talk to the kid.”

  Patrick nods, pulls on thin plastic gloves. “I get to have all the fun.”

  As Harkness walks toward the boy, he bends down to pocket a snub-nose, its grip wrapped with grimy medical tape. “It’s okay, kid,” he says softly.

  The kid’s face is light coffee brown with the scared blue-gray eyes of a German shepherd puppy. He’s about ninety pounds of raw nerves, wearing a gray T-shirt and cheap jeans that hang limply from his narrow hips. All Harkness feels is shivering bones. The boy says nothing as Harkness pats him down.

  “Got a name?”

  The boy stares at him, pale eyes glowing in the gloom. He reaches around and scratches his back.

  “Lord said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody, floody,” Patrick sings to himself.

  “Find anything?”

  “No blood, wounds, whacks,” Patrick says. “Just a wad of cash in his pocket and a big honking needle mark on his left arm. Don’t take a genius to come up with the cause of death.”

  “ID?”

  “Nothing yet.” Patrick peels off his gloves and throws them on the floor. “Leave it for the techs.”

  “No one’s coming back here for days.” Harkness turns to the boy. “Who’s that?” He points at the body.

  The boy just keeps staring.

  “Kid don’t have much to say, does he?” Patrick tosses over the dead man’s key ring and Harkness reaches up to catch it. He opens the cheap lock and unwraps the shiny chain from around the boy’s waist.

  The boy darts toward the door.

  Harkness reaches out an arm to snag him. “Hold on a second.”

  The quiet boy’s breathing like he just finished a marathon. His eyes ping back and forth and then linger on the couch.

  Harkness is a legendary finder of drugs, money, guns, shell casings, cell phones, and the other well-hidden debris of the drug trade. But this hide is easy to spot. The kid might as well be pointing a finger. Harkness walks over to the couch and pushes his hand beneath the cushions. Nothing. Then he reaches back in the gritty space between the cushions and feels a slit in the lining. Reaching farther, he feels plastic. He pulls out a thick quart-size bag jammed with rubber-banded bundles of packets, each stamped with a blood-red horse.

  Harkness holds out the bag to Patrick.

  “Mother lode, Harky. That’s more than a kilo.”

  Harkness stuffs the drugs in a yellow evidence bag and tosses it to Patrick.

  He catches the bag, holds it up. “Know anything about this, skinny kid?”

  The boy says nothing.

  “Waiting for his lawyer, I guess.”

  “The kid’s deaf,” Harkness says.

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “Been watching my lips when I talk. Most kids would have just shouted instead of shooting out the window. And how many people around here keep the sound off on their TV?”

  “Like none.”

  Harkness kneels down in front of the boy and his hands move in fluid motion, telling him that everything’s going to be okay.

  The kid signs back, hands a blur. He says the dead guy’s his uncle, and that other people, bad ones, are on their way to the apartment.

  Harkness tells him not to worry, they’re leaving.

  Patrick’s eyes open wide. “When’d you learn that?”

  “Taught myself a little American Sign Language one summer when I was a kid, back in Nagog.”

  “Must’ve been one boring motherfucker of a summer.”

  “You have no idea,” Harkness says. “Give him your candy bar.”

  “How do you know I got one?”

  “You’re Patrick Fitzgerald, aren’t you?”

  Patrick reaches into the pocket of his jacket and holds out a Mars Bar like he’s feeding a tiger. Deaf Kid takes off the wrapper gingerly, sniffs the candy bar, then devours it.

  “We really gotta clear out of here, Harky.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Like now.”

  Their radios blare the department-wide emergency tone for the first time Harkness can remember and they stand still for a silent moment listening to the dead air before the dispatcher’s terse voice echoes through the room. “All units. Channel Dam breached, major flooding expected. Leave evacuation zone immediately and await further . . .”

  Harkness picks up Deaf Kid, throws him over his shoulder, and runs toward the door, Patrick following. Their footsteps echo down the dank green stairwell, walls darkened by hundreds of trailing hands.

  Outside, the brown water’s halfway up the squad-car door. Harkness wades in up to his waist, Deaf Kid slung over his shoulder, and looks into the flooded car, laptop and radio already underwater. Dunkin’ Donuts cups swirl like cheerful boats in the back seat.

  Patrick pauses in the hotel entryway. Cars are starting to break loose in the rising water and drift down the street. “Hey, Harky,” he shouts over the howling storm.

  “What?”

  “Don’t know how to swim.”

  “Now you tell me.” Harkness nods toward the hotel. “Inside, quick. Get back upstairs.”

  The water running down Albrecht Street reverses, flowing away from the square—slowly at first, then faster. Harkness turns to see what’s happening.

  The seething wave blossoms, fat with trash. Plastic bottles fleck its crest. Foam blows like spit. Cars rise up its face and smash with the crunch of metal and glass. Harkness keeps Deaf Kid turned so he can’t see the wave rushing at them—five blocks away, then three blocks, two . . .

  Waist-high in whiskey-colored water, Harkness reaches for his belt and unclips his handcuffs. He wraps one cold steel cuff around his wrist then clicks the other closed around Deaf Kid’s narrow ankle as the wave sweeps over them.

  2

  THEY THRASH THROUGH the tempest, swept underwater and dragged down with the cars, trashcans, and stinking debris, the dirty water pulling at them with greedy hands. Harkness struggles toward the dim light above them, swimming with one flailing arm and dragging Deaf Kid cuffed to the other.

  Harkness grabs the door handle of a Town Taxi f
loating by and climbs aboard, pulling Deaf Kid up on the roof by his leg. Skinny chest heaving, the boy sprawls on the slippery surface and coughs up a spume of sepia water.

  Harkness takes Deaf Kid by the shoulders and looks into his dimming eyes. The boy’s stunned and about to go into shock. Harkness reaches in his pocket for the key, unlocks the handcuff around Deaf Kid’s narrow ankle. He nods at the OFF DUTY light and the kid latches onto it.

  They ride on the taxi’s roof past warehouses and apartment buildings, the street a raging river, the cab a lurching, rudderless barge. They’re half drowned and lashed by rain but grinning. For one stolen moment they revel in just being alive.

  Then the street tilts down and the cab rushes past apartments, corner stores, and a payday-loan office. Ahead, Albrecht Square glows orange from a burning apartment building, black smoke billowing from every window. Darker shapes dot the water, some flailing and screaming, others floating face-down.

  A man leans out of the second-floor window of an apartment building, long dark hair hanging in wet tendrils as he shakes his head at the chaos and destruction—a musician, waiter, night watchman. Doesn’t matter. He looks alert and strong. They lock eyes as the cab floats closer. Harkness points down at Deaf Kid then toward the apartment. The man nods, ducks inside, and comes back with others, who lean out the row of windows.

  Harkness stands on the roof, gets his footing, then waves at Deaf Kid to get up. Standing but shaky, he angles his dirty Keds like he’s on a surfboard. Harkness grabs the kid by the waist.

  Deaf Kid looks confused. Harkness smiles, then lifts him up in the air like a sack of leaves and gives him a precisely timed toss toward the waiting hands. Strangers reach out to pull him inside the apartment.

  Harkness watches as Deaf Kid squirms in a window and disappears. Then the long-haired guy shakes his head and waves his hands in front of him as if trying to ward off a demon. As Harkness turns, a sizzling black cable coils around his neck and pulls him from the roof of the taxi.

  Looking out into the dim, rain-slashed afternoon, Harkness sees a battered white trailer bob in a construction site like a child’s toy. Water laps against the stained-glass windows of the red-brick chapel for merchant sailors. Wayward sailboats and floating cars cluster around the courthouse. Only the roof deck remains of the late-night whiskey bar, no loss there—the drunks kept May awake.