by Rory Flynn
“Department of Youth Offenders has him.”
“DYO?” Harkness shakes his head. “He didn’t do anything wrong. They won’t know what to do with him.” DYO is legendary for no-show caseworkers who let kids fall through the cracks. He gets up from his desk and stalks toward the window to stare down at Copley Square. “Let’s get him out of there.”
“When did we get in the deaf-kid business?”
“Since we found one.”
Patrick joins him at the window. “You and your strays, Harky. Got to say, I’m thankful, being one. On the other hand, I think you got enough already.”
Harkness goes silent, narrows his gaze at the steps of the library.
“See something, say something.” Patrick intones the Homeland Security creed without enthusiasm.
“That guy coming out of the library? Recognize him?” Harkness points to a short guy with a backpack, his smoke-bush hair swaying in the wind.
Patrick shakes his head. “Looks like any other dumb-ass student.”
Harkness grabs his badge and throws on his gun belt and leather jacket. “Looks like Mouse. Dealer out in Nagog. Remember him?”
“Oh yeah, that guy. Major douche. Sold that nasty smart drug.” Irresistible, expensive, and deadly, Third Rail is a Narco-Intel Hall of Famer.
“Mouse owes me.”
“Owes you what?”
Harkness holds up his left hand, most of its index finger missing. “A finger.”
4
HIS MISSING FINGER ACHES, Harkness could swear it does, as he runs across Copley Square toward the library entrance. That would be impossible—no finger can remember who did the severing.
But Harkness does.
He’s coming up behind the hairy guy in a black denim vest. As he gets closer, Harkness reaches for his gun out of habit, then forces his hand away.
“Hey, Mouse.”
Mouse turns, looks at him, then starts to run, the planks and his short legs slowing his progress. Harkness tackles Mouse, taking him down like he’s a hipster piñata.
“You can’t just, like, do that.”
“I smell probable cause.” Harkness rolls Mouse over and rummages through his muddy backpack, finding only a sticker-covered laptop and a stack of crumpled papers.
“Hey, man, that’s not any of your—”
Harkness holds up his left hand, its index finger neatly severed at the first knuckle.
Mouse stops suddenly when he recognizes Harkness. “Oh, wow. Dude. It’s you.”
“You almost killed me.” Harkness reaches down to pull Mouse off the ground and half drags, half walks him away from the crowd to a dark alcove next to the building’s entrance. “Before I haul you in, I want to hear an apology, loud and clear.”
In the shadow of one of the library’s guardian statues, where scholars smoke, lovers kiss, bums piss, and book thieves compare tactics, Harkness shoves Mouse down, presses his boot crossways on Mouse’s throat, and leans on it until the air starts to wheeze out of him like a pawnshop accordion.
Seeing Mouse rolling in the rot drags Harkness back to a Halloween party in a muddy field. A riot, screaming kids high on Third Rail, Candace searching for May—it isn’t a time that Harkness wants to revisit.
Mouse waves his arms like he has something important to say. Everyone does when he has a boot on his throat.
Harkness lets up.
“Heard you were living with Candace now,” Mouse croaks. “That’s pretty weird.”
“When I want your comments on my personal life,” Harkness says, “a neon sign that says Your Comments Here will light up over my head, okay?”
“I mean, you killed Dex, dude.” Mouse continues, ignoring the lack of neon. He fails to mention that Dex, Candace’s ex-lover and May’s father, was shooting at Harkness at the time. “That guy was a fucking genius.” Mouse’s hushed tone implies that Harkness, a mere cop, will never even come close to being that intelligent.
“Okay, heard enough out of you.” Harkness puts his boot back in place.
“Stop. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”
Harkness nods, moves his boot away.
“It wasn’t my fault, anyway.” Mouse sits up, tries to brush the mud from his vest. “I have ESD.”
Harkness just stares.
“Empathetic-sideman disorder,” Mouse says, as if announcing that he has pancreatic cancer.
“That a real disease?”
“Should be.”
“ ’Splain.”
“It’s when you’re around someone who makes you do things you wouldn’t ever do if they weren’t around. Heard of Bill Evans?”
“Not much of a jazz guy.” Harkness spent his youth in sweaty clubs listening to one-minute songs of the faster-louder variety.
“Bill Evans turned into a junkie for years,” Mouse says. “Not because he was a junkie—’cause, dude, he was like the straightest white guy in earth. But because of Miles Davis. Miles made all his sidemen get weird.”
“So that’s your excuse? Dex made you a freak?”
“Made me violent.”
“The only thing I know about you is that there’s still a warrant out for your arrest for assaulting a police officer.” Harkness reaches back for his cuffs. “That would be me.”
“Come on, man,” Mouse says. “It’s ancient history.”
“Wasn’t even a year ago.”
“In Internet time, that’s forever.”
“Tell it to the DA.” Harkness bends forward and grabs a hairy wrist. He’s about to cuff and Miranda Mouse when the cobblestones shift beneath his feet and the cooling afternoon air sputters like water drops hitting a hot skillet.
“Harky? Harky?”
Harkness wakes lying on the dirty cobblestones, concerned faces clustered in a tight circle above him—Patrick, Esther, other Narco-Intel cops, a handful of office workers on their lunch hour, but not Mouse.
“Hey, get that guy,” Harkness slurs. “Guy with a beard and a backpack.” Harkness tries to stand but Patrick puts out a hand to stop him.
“That’s like half the dudes in Boston, Harky.”
“There’s a warrant out on this one.”
“Well, he’s gone now.” Patrick clicks his radio and puts the word out. “Now we’re just going to get you back to the office so a doc can check you out.”
Harkness tries to stand, his head heavy, legs wobbly.
“That cop’s drunk,” someone mutters.
“Figures,” another says. “They’re all drunk.”
“Guy’s a hero, smart-asses. Got a head injury in the line of duty,” Patrick shouts. “Scatter. I mean it. Shoo!” He waves the people away like they’re the swampy smell wafting over the square.
The crowd disappears and Harkness stands. Some papers from Mouse’s backpack are scattered on the cobblestones, and Harkness tries to pick them up.
“This is where you get in trouble, Harky,” Patrick says. “Putting your head down low. Makin’ all the blood rush.” Patrick squats down and collects the papers. “You’re going back to the office for some desk duty until the doc says you’re back to normal. Or normal enough.”
Harkness says nothing, just leans on Patrick as they stumble along the crooked planks that stretch across the square.
5
A WAITRESS COMPLAINS THAT her meds are in her apartment and the city won’t let her back in her cordoned-off neighborhood. A crying young girl says her cat, Teddy, is still locked in her flooded apartment. A convenience store has been looted down to its bare shelves. “Whatever the water didn’t ruin, they come and took,” its owner says to the TV reporter in knee-high rubber boots. The camera shows empty Lower South End streets, still flooded weeks after the hurricane.
The story shifts to Brighton, where a storm-damaged biomedical lab is without power. A somber reporter delivers the update in front of the lab, thick with emergency crews in hazmat suits. “A frightened neighborhood still wonders, When will the frozen specimens in this lab start to thaw?
Will the flood unleash smallpox, Ebola, or other deadly viruses?” Harkness clicks and the storm porn disappears.
His cell phone rings. It’s his brother’s number. Harkness considers not answering.
“George.”
“Eddy. Get my message?”
“Been kinda under the weather. Literally.”
“What happened?”
“Got head-butted by a car during the hurricane. And electrocuted, thanks for asking.”
“Saw that thing on the Internet! Nice job, bro. He shoots, he scores! You’re like a fucking hero again.”
“Hardly.”
His brother pauses and takes a slow inhale, gearing up. Every call from George comes with a demand. “You and Candace should come out and have dinner with Nora and me in Nagog. Got some family stuff to figure out.”
This rare nonfinancial request takes Harkness by surprise, makes him wonder what George is up to. His brother decided to keep the family company afloat after the small-town Ponzi scheme of their late father, Edward “Red” Harkness, came unraveled. The survival of Harkness and Sons is all George thinks about. But maybe there’s still a brother beneath the businessman.
“Sure,” Harkness says.
“Good.”
“Got to get back to work, George.” Harkness’s thumb is edging toward the End Call button.
“And I need your help with something,” George blurts out.
Harkness clicks his phone off.
The stray papers from Mouse’s backpack, stacked on the edge of his desk, catch his eye. He flips through printouts of books from the 1700s. Harkness stops when he comes across pages from A Compleat Record of the Laws Pertaining to Nagog, Massachusetts. Why would Mouse care about the ancient laws of a quiet colonial town? That Nagog is also his hometown makes Harkness even more curious. He puts the papers in his notebook and clips on his badge.
Patrick looks up from his computer screen when Harkness walks past his desk.
“Just going to the library,” Harkness says.
“Don’t get into trouble.”
Harkness smiles. “How much trouble can you get into at the library, really?”
“You? Plenty.”
Harkness walks quietly down the middle aisle of Bates Hall, the Boston Public Library’s enormous reading room, its ceiling vaulted like a basilica of books, long wooden tables lit by green-glass lamps. Diligent high-school kids study, businessmen stare at laptop screens, and street people mutter in their sleep. Harkness opens the green door marked Rare Books and sidles past rows of barrels filled with flood-sodden books. He climbs a marble staircase, its narrow windows facing a dim air shaft, tan paint flaking off the walls like dried mud.
On the third floor, the maze of shelves ends at a large, windowless room, more laboratory than library—the Rare Books Department. Technicians in white coats huddle over a sophisticated scanner, the shelves behind them lined with leather-bound books locked behind glass.
A technician with close-cropped blond hair walks closer. “Can I help you, Officer?” The ID tag hanging around his neck says GLENN SIMON, SENIOR CURATOR.
“Sorry to bother you,” Harkness says. “I just have a quick question.”
Glenn squints. “Eddy? Eddy Harkness?”
“Right.” Harkness tries to place the stranger, hopes he isn’t someone he busted.
“Graduated a year after you.”
A vague memory of a younger, scrawnier version of Glenn surfaces, an intense freshman striding across the elm-cosseted Harvard Yard.
Glenn can see that Harkness doesn’t really remember him. “Not a problem, Eddy. I pretty much lived in Widener.”
“Yeah.” Harkness spent most of his time in basement clubs full of noise and skinheads. Widener Library was for naps in the reference room or sex in the stacks.
“Looks like we both went for the big money, doesn’t it? A cop and a curator. Both working for the city. Not exactly Goldman Sachs.”
“No, not at all.” Almost a decade after graduation, even Harkness’s coolest friends have ended up working at investment banks.
“But we managed to avoid the magnetic allure of lucre.” Glenn smiles at his own cleverness. Harkness can envision him in his spotless Cambridge condo drinking single-malt late into the night as he sings along with Stephen Malkmus.
Harkness hands Glenn the stack of printouts from his pocket. “What can you tell me about these?”
“Where’d you get them?”
“From some guy who tried to kill me last year.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“He didn’t kill me.”
Glenn flips through the papers. “Looks like part of Revolutionary Records. Finished the scanning right before the flood. About thirty handwritten legal record books from Lexington, Charlestown, Nagog—all the Revolutionary-era towns.”
Harkness holds up a page from the Compleat Record of the Laws Pertaining to Nagog. “Grew up in Nagog.”
“Lucky you. Nice little town.”
“Debatable,” Harkness says. “Look, why would anyone care about this stuff?”
Glenn tilts his head. “People like reading about obscure laws. They’re like terms of service from the past. Like not letting sheep out on the town green after eight in the evening. You can’t shout on the Sabbath. Kissing in public is punishable by an hour of whipping. Stuff like that. Every couple of years, the History Channel does a story about the laws that are still on the books around here. One of those ‘quaint old New England’ feature stories. Maybe your guy was doing some research?”
“Maybe.” Mouse doesn’t seem like a closet historian.
The scanner sends out an eye-searing blast of light and Harkness nods toward it. “What’s that all about?”
Glenn rolls his eyes. “New initiative. O’Mara wants to digitize everything in the Special Collections. The hurricane got the mayor all worried about the city’s priceless intellectual treasures.” He puts air quotes around the last words.
“This place looks pretty safe.” Harkness glances around the busy lab. “Anyway, you’re up on the third floor.”
Glenn shakes his head. “Protecting the books is only half of the story.” He searches his worktable and then tosses Harkness a pair of white cotton gloves. “Put these on for a second.”
Harkness pulls on the gloves and Glenn stacks books in his hands.
“Here’s a Nuremberg Chronicle. Here’s a book printed by William Blake.” Glenn piles on more books, then unlocks a glass case and takes out a small volume. “And here’s the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America.”
Harkness steadies the wavering stack.
“There,” Glenn says. “You’re holding about a hundred million dollars in rare books.”
“Had no idea.”
Glenn carefully removes each book. “Well, the mayor, our mutual employer, definitely does.” The scanner sends out another blast like lightning striking the small room. “They’re like money in the bank.”
“Except they’re not in a bank,” Harkness says.
Glenn raises his eyebrows. “Exactly.”
6
PATRICK BARGES INTO Harkness’s office and stares out his window down at Boylston Street. “Commissioner! Commissioner!” Arms flailing, he rushes back to his cubicle to shovel all his desk debris into a trashcan. The other detectives pull off their headphones, sit up straight, and concentrate on their computers with new rigor. Commissioner Lattimore commands fear along with respect, thanks to his blistering tongue and on-the-spot demotions.
“People.” Commissioner Lattimore strides through Narco-Intel’s front office, a phalanx of aides in tow.
Everyone stands, salutes crisply.
Lattimore puts his hand on Harkness’s shoulder. “Feeling better, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Harkness nods.
“Ready to get out of the office for an hour or so, aren’t you? Get a little air?” Lattimore always encodes the answers into his questions, a habit from years of interrogation
s.
Harkness smiles, says what the commissioner wants to hear. “That would be great, sir.”
“Excellent,” he says. “Because I could use your help with a . . . situation. And there’s someone downstairs who wants to see you.”
Deaf Kid sits inside the commissioner’s SUV like a tiny time traveler in a glossy black spaceship. Seeing Harkness, he starts smacking on the smoky glass with both fists. When the door opens, he flings himself forward and throws his skinny arms around Harkness’s shoulders.
Harkness signs that it’s great to see him, asks whether everything’s okay. The boy just shakes his head no. He pinches his orange Department of Youth Offenders sweatshirt like it’s toxic. Harkness climbs inside next to Deaf Kid. They’re thrown back in their leather seats as the SUV hurtles down Boylston. The driver takes a hard right on Dartmouth and their caravan crosses into the expensive part of the South End, with its home-goods stores and farm-to-table bistros.
“A month later and it’s like the flood never happened,” Lattimore shouts from the passenger seat. “The city is in major denial. Everyone got all bent out of shape about the smallpox thing and you know what?” Lattimore doesn’t wait for an answer. “Nothing happened. The emergency generators kicked in and the bio lab’s fine. End of story.”
Harkness nods. The things people worry about usually don’t happen.
“But the Lower South End? We’re getting pounded there, Harkness. Citizens throwing rocks at us because we won’t let them back into their apartments.”
“That’s not our decision,” Harkness says.
“Try telling that to a screaming mother with three kids,” Lattimore says. “They’re calling us storm troopers on Twitter. Ha-fucking-ha-ha.”
Lattimore keeps going. “That guy’s making all the wrong moves, if you ask me. No press conference. No reconstruction plan. He manages from the neck up. No heart. All dollar signs. Won’t even return my calls.”
Harkness nods. That guy is the new mayor, Michael O’Mara, who emerged as an unexpected winner in last fall’s election after tacking together a pro-business coalition. Harkness doesn’t mention that he voted for O’Mara, who seemed more competent than his opponent, Sam Reed—a perennial Mr. Nice Guy on the city council.