Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  Next to the Northern Avenue Bridge, three Harbor Patrol boats, blue lights flashing, surround the harbormaster’s shack. Harkness thinks it’s strange—that building’s been empty for decades—then his gaze wanders to an orange emergency raft gliding through the seaport’s streets, now more like canals. Harkness focuses, remembers lying in the bottom of one of those rafts, a Harbor Patrol officer shouting down at him in the rain. But he doesn’t know how he got home or how long he’s been here in their apartment, staring down at his flooded neighborhood.

  He’s not even sure anything he sees is real. Is he back in their apartment or dreaming about it?

  The parquet floor shifts and sways like the basket of a hot-air balloon. Harkness touches the wall to still it.

  When he closes his eyes he sees Albrecht Square flooded and burning and wonders if it was all just a nightmare. Then Harkness raises his hand to touch the bandage on his chest. He pulls away the white tape and lifts the bandage to reveal a silver-dollar-size circle of blackened, blistered skin just below his collarbone, the raw wound covered with clear ointment.

  He winces and presses the bandage back in place.

  Light footsteps slide across the floor, and the bedroom door inches open.

  “Hey, you’re supposed to be asleep.” Candace’s dark eyes look concerned, her face even more pale than usual. She’s wearing her good-luck outfit—Celtics sweatpants and a time-thinned Misfits T-shirt—and she clutches a splayed copy of All for One, her comfort book.

  “I’m awake, right?”

  She puts her arms around Harkness and holds him close, tears trailing down her cheeks. “Jesus, Eddy. You stepped in it this time.”

  “I’m okay,” he says, voice hoarse. He’s swallowed seawater and gutter water, sewage and gasoline, who knows what else.

  “Better be.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  She squints. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

  “Not really.” Harkness shakes his head slowly.

  “You got smacked in the head, zapped by a live wire, and half drowned,” she says.

  He nods, remembers fragments—the orange emergency raft, a doctor’s neutral face hovering in a white room.

  “You’re lucky to be alive, Eddy.”

  Harkness says nothing.

  “You were in the hospital for three nights,” Candace says. “They were worried about brain swelling but it didn’t happen. You’ve got a concussion but they said your head would start to clear in a week or so. You’re just supposed to chill out and keep your head elevated. Plus you’re on pain meds, antibiotics, and a bunch of other drugs.”

  “How’d I get here?”

  “Ambulance from the hospital,” she says. “Your friend Lattimore made it happen.” Candace nods toward the window. “Neighborhood’s all messed up. They’re calling it the Inundation District now,” she says. “Remember all that fancy Dutch flood stuff they told us about when we moved in here? The reservoir beneath the building, the electrical room on the upper floor?”

  Harkness nods, has no idea what Candace is talking about.

  “It worked. No water. No problems. Like the flood never happened.”

  But it did, Harkness thinks.

  Candace puts her book on the bedside table and holds out an Elvis-worthy handful of pills in her working hand. When she was seventeen, Candace lost her left hand in a small-plane crash that killed her mother and sister. The accident seems prophetic to Harkness now though he can’t say exactly why.

  “Time for more drugs,” she says.

  Harkness stares at the bright capsules in her palm, and then Candace’s hand is empty and the water glass on the nightstand is drained. He wonders if this is what Alzheimer’s feels like.

  The apartment seems too quiet. “Where’s . . .” He searches his sputtering mind for Candace’s daughter’s name. “May?”

  Candace tilts her head. “She’s downstairs at Nate and Shawna’s, playing with Jenna. Wanted to keep the noise down so you can rest.”

  “She okay?”

  “May’s fine,” Candace says. “To a three-year-old, being trapped at home during a storm is an adventure.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know you asked me the same questions about May like an hour ago, right?”

  “Don’t remember that.”

  “Check this out.” Candace holds up the front section of the Globe and waves it, trying to bring back fast-thinking, relentlessly focused Eddy. “Building manager dropped this by a couple of days ago. He thought you might want an old-style copy, for your scrapbook or something.”

  Harkness stares at the giant headline that screams FLOOD. In a black box at the top the mayor warns people to stay off the streets until further notice.

  Candace opens the paper. “You’re a bright spot in the storm.” There are photos of the Charles River rushing across the Esplanade, rows of commuter trains underwater in the South Station rail yard, the UMass Boston campus cut off from the mainland by the storm surge. Then he sees a black-haired cop who looks like he just got sprayed with a fire hose standing on the hood of a floating cab, a scrawny kid hovering just above him in mid-toss while waiting arms reach down to grab him.

  “I don’t remember anyone taking pictures.”

  “Cell phones, Eddy. Someone’s pretty much always taking pictures.”

  Harkness wonders where Deaf Kid is now, and Patrick. He turns to Candace. “Hey, help me find my uniform.”

  “Got to be kidding,” she says. “They cut off what was left of it in the ER.”

  “There’s another one somewhere.” He tries to remember where.

  “Eddy, you’re supposed to take at least another week off to recover. You got whacked around. And you’re not acting normal yet, just so you know. Even for you.”

  He closes his eyes, sees nothing but water and fire.

  “Anyway, you can’t go anywhere. No one can. The mayor says we all have to stay put until the electricity’s back on and the flood starts to go down.”

  “When’s that supposed to happen?”

  “Pretty soon,” she says. “Wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Dodged a bullet, that’s what they’re saying.”

  “Who’s saying that?”

  The room shifts again and Harkness lurches toward the bed. He hears Candace talking in the distance. The room darkens as a cloud crosses the dim sun hovering over Chinatown.

  A high oscillating note, warm as a Stratocaster playing through a vintage tube amp, rings in his right ear then moves to the left. George got a Strat for Christmas once, Olympic white with a tortoiseshell pick guard. Harkness wonders where his brother’s guitar ended up, reminds himself to ask. It’s probably worth a pile now and George always needs more money . . .

  Harkness’s knees give way and he sprawls on the bed. “Sorry, really tired.” Candace lifts his head gently to put a pillow underneath it, then covers him with a blanket. Like a body at a crime scene, he thinks as he drops into deep, black sleep.

  That night Harkness patrols the streets of the Lower South End before the flood, his drug-slowed dreams summoning up the neighborhood he knew when he was a rookie—restaurant-supply stores, a tearoom for readings, old-style Irish pubs, cheap hotels and apartments that rented by the month. Albrecht Square had the worn charm of Dirty Old Boston. It was the Scollay Square that the city fathers couldn’t tear down.

  Then the light over the neighborhood shifts to verdigris and the streets stream with stinking water, sweeping him away. Harkness’s legs uncoil in his sleep as he sinks underwater and tries to swim.

  Churning her narrow legs, Little Dorothy kicks closer, her pink dress billowing like the poisoned scrim of a jellyfish. She turns her head to reveal the vernixed oval of bone where her face once was before she became just another dead girl. Years ago, Harkness found Little Dorothy hidden behind the wall of a Fenway meth lab, her stiff, starved body stuffed head-down in a bucket of sodium hydroxide.

  No matter how many years pass, no
matter how many other bodies he sees, Little Dorothy still travels with him, a memory he can’t drink away.

  The underwater revenant points a pale finger at Harkness and opens her tattered mouth to give out a burbling laugh, a message to Harkness and all of the other survivors.

  The storm may be over. But the damage is just beginning.

  3

  A DIVING MASK HANGS from the coat rack in the corner of Harkness’s office and a striped beach towel waits in the center of his desk topped with a Post-it note that says Gone Swimmin’. Harkness smiles and shakes his head. He’s back at work at Narco-Intel headquarters, four floors above Boylston Street. Patrick and the others have had a week to mess with his office.

  “Thanks, people,” Harkness says to the detectives hanging around his office door. “I’m amused and honored. Now get back to work.”

  They drift back to their cubes. Harkness looks out his window at cobblestoned Copley Square, ornate Trinity Church to the left, somber Boston Public Library to the right, the shimmering blue spear of the Hancock Building rising behind them both. Generators roar on Boylston Street, sunny and hot now that the last of the storm has spiraled out over the North Atlantic. Hoses spew murky water from basement bars. City workers in emergency vests shovel mud into green plastic barrels, feed downed branches into roaring chippers. Students, scholars, and bums step carefully along the crooked wooden walkways that cross the watery edges of the square.

  Harkness turns to find Esther Vieramenos standing in his doorway. She’s tall and birdlike, wearing a gray sweater on a hot day, dark bangs falling in front of darker eyes that lurk behind thick black-rimmed glasses. Her ID hangs from her narrow neck on a summer-camp rawhide lanyard. She looks like a detective someone bought on Etsy.

  “I tried that shit, boss,” she whispers.

  “What shit?”

  “Dark Horse.”

  “You mean you gave it a little taste, right?” Harkness busted her years ago when she was a coke-dealing Brandeis chemistry major. Now she’s the Narco-Intel lab rat.

  She shakes her head. “Nope. Swiped a gram from Evidence and snorted it low and slow all during the flood. Savored it like a wine taster.”

  Harkness looks up at the ceiling. “I’m going to have to unhear that.”

  Esther’s their canary in the coal mine. She thinks like an addict because she used to be one.

  Or maybe still is.

  “I was stuck at home in Waltham, boss. Couldn’t go anywhere. Sheltering in place was a big bore. Moody Street was flooded. Internet was out. Wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

  Harkness holds his hand up. “Still unhearing.” When Harkness drafted Esther for Narco-Intel she promised to stay on the straight edge. “Backsliding?”

  “Nope,” she says. “Just doing some not-so-scientific research.”

  “Sure.”

  “Dark Horse is messed up.”

  “You mean deadly,” Harkness says.

  “Way too strong for what it’s going for on the street.” Esther shrugs. “Maybe they’re getting people hooked, then they’ll jack up the price. I’ll take a closer look at it in the lab.”

  “Do that. But just a look, okay?” Harkness steps toward Esther and stares into her dark brown eyes, checks that her pupils aren’t constricted. At least she’s not high on the job. He couldn’t have let that slide. “Still getting tested?” Esther’s contract includes random drug testing.

  “Yeah?”

  “If you ever test positive I’ll have to fire you, you know that, right?”

  Esther shrugs. “Don’t worry about me, boss. I got buckets of normal pee. People’re peeing for me all over the city.”

  “Thanks for that,” Harkness says.

  Now Patrick’s hovering at his office door.

  “I want full lab results next week, okay?”

  Esther nods and turns. She runs her hand along Patrick’s chest as they pass. “Hey, Patrick. I may be half Cuban but I’m all yours.” She beams an unhinged smile at her office rival.

  “I don’t hang with freaky chicks who collect pee.”

  “Your loss.” She clicks the door closed.

  “Welcome back to the garden of misfit toys an’ shit,” Patrick says.

  “Glad to be back.”

  “Feeling better?”

  Harkness sits down at his desk. “Kind of. What’d I miss?”

  “A week of flood duty with some clown lieutenant from A-One,” Patrick says. He points down at the square. “We guarded a burnt-out power station. Cordoned off the flooded T station over in Maverick Square. Shoveled fish in the North End. That was a really fun day. The city’s going to stink forever.”

  The roiling green clouds of the hurricane rained biblical hauls of fish down on the city—cod, stripers, small sharks, rays, and thick globs of jellyfish. Sucked up from the Grand Banks, now they clog alleys and dry on rooftops.

  “It’ll pass,” Harkness says. “Everything goes away.”

  “Deep, boss. Think I’ll write that down,” Patrick says, but doesn’t.

  Harkness nods toward his dual computer screens, one playing the local news with the sound off, the other crowded with DEA trend data, the OD list from Boston City Hospital, and hundreds of unanswered e-mails. “Trending?”

  “Just junk, junk, and more junk,” he says. “Startin’ to look like the Salvation Army around here. Every now and then I actually miss good ol’ Oxy. At least people knew what they were getting with pills.”

  “We need to flag Dark Horse,” Harkness says.

  “Why? It’s just old-style black tar. Crap heroin from California.”

  “Esther says it’s weird.”

  “I say Esther’s weird.”

  “Agreed, but we’re getting more confirmed overdoses.” Harkness points to the screen. “Send out an info request to the network. I don’t want to keep finding Dark Horse bags next to dead people.”

  Patrick holds up his hands. “Done, boss. Department-wide?”

  Harkness thinks. “Put it out to the whole network.”

  “Whatever you say, Harky. But this one’s not worth the trouble. Black tar ain’t nothing new.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Narco-Intel’s mission is “to take an unconventional, more effective approach to drug interdiction.” Just how unconventional is an ongoing topic of discussion among Boston Police Department commanders, who regard the Bad Boys of the BPD with a mix of respect, eye-rolling, and worry that they’ll go too far, again.

  The Narcotics Information Network was one of Harkness’s first innovations, a network of unlikely sources—bodega owners in Dudley Square, single mothers in Bromley-Heath, neighborhood dog walkers on Castle Island, art students in grimy Fenway basement apartments. Thousands of eyes on the street will turn up every­thing from empty heroin packets to cell-phone photos of ­users to addresses of potential dealers—all fed into a database that Patrick calls Big Data on Drugs.

  Patrick reaches for the card taped to a bottle of Jameson on the briefing table. “Least you could do is open the note, Harky.”

  “Was just about to do that.”

  Patrick rips open the tiny envelope. “Card says ‘Fantastic job, as usual. Get well soon. Apply this to affected areas.’” Patrick holds the card up to the light. “Bet one of his doofus helper dudes wrote it—the commissioner’s just not that funny. Looks like he really signed it, though.”

  “Quit reading my mail,” Harkness says, not looking away from his computer screen.

  “All’s I get is hardware catalogs and postcards from the gym.”

  “Maybe you ought to go sometime.”

  “To the hardware store?”

  “To the gym. Or at least the swimming pool.”

  Patrick flails his hands in front of him. “Now that’s just crazy talk, Harky. We ain’t gonna see another hurricane like that for years, that’s what they’re saying on TV.”

  “Who, Fox?”

  “No, real people.”

  Harkness
stands and the room blurs and sparkles. He wavers, then sits back down, pressing his fingertips on his desk to keep from keeling over.

  “You okay?”

  Harkness gives a small nod, eyes closed. “From that concussion. Supposed to take it easy for another week or so.” A question surfaces in Harkness’s sputtering mind. He opens his eyes. “What about the kid?”

  Patrick thrusts out his phone. “Seen this?”

  Onscreen, Harkness throws Deaf Kid over and over from the top of a floating cab into the waiting arms of strangers who seem to be several floors above, thanks to editing that adds yards to the toss. The screen blazes with the words HE SHOOTS, HE SCORES!

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Animated GIF thingy,” Patrick says. “You’re a meme already. Gone viral.”

  “Can’t antibiotics kill that off?”

  “Most people would love that kind of attention.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  Patrick watches Deaf Kid go airborne one last time then pockets his phone. “Deaf Kid checked out clean from the hospital, except he’s underweight. And stone-deaf, course. You called that one. Kid doesn’t even have a real name.”

  “What?”

  “Birth certificate says Unnamed Boy. Mom never got around to fixing it.”

  “Relatives?”

  “Dead junkie sprawled next to the radiator actually was his uncle. Went by the name Levon Ashmont.”

  “His uncle chained him to a radiator, really?”

  Patrick shrugs. “Had like a dozen priors. Violent offender. Big-league dealer, which explains the value pack of junk stuck in the couch. Anyhow, you got to admit, the kid’s kind of a wildcat.”

  “Weren’t we all,” Harkness says. “Any other family around?”

  “Father got shot dead last year in Dudley. Mom’s crazy, ended up in MCI. Got diabetes something awful. They ran out of things to amputate.”

  “Where’s the kid now?”