Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  Harkness finds Candace and Nora. Together they drift to the emergency exit at the side of the auditorium and walk into the crisp air of the parking lot.

  “Somebody likes you,” Candace says with a musical lilt in her voice.

  “What?”

  “I think that wanderer woman has a hankering for Harkness.”

  “No way.”

  “Kinda cute in a speckly way. Julianne Moore can play her when they make The Wanderer Story.” Candace switches to a deeper voice. “Critics give two thumbs-up to this heartbreaking story of a little town with a big heart.”

  “I’m sure Jennet would like that.”

  “Just don’t go wandering with her,” Candace says. “Or I’ll have to strangle her with her nice hair.” Her smile brightens at the thought.

  Beneath the yellow lights of the parking lot, the crowd trudges between cars, headlights flash on, and a long line of Outbacks inches toward the exit. Everyone’s glad to be escaping the meeting, though the occasional angry shout reminds Harkness that not everyone’s happy about the final vote. Far from it. He stays in front as they walk to Candace’s red Toyota, eyes darting left and right.

  “Oh no!” Nora runs her finger down the deep scratches that stretch from headlight to taillight on the side of the Corolla.

  “What the fuck!” Candace says. “How’d they know we voted for the wanderers?”

  Harkness points to the bumper. “I think the Sam Reed for Mayor sticker probably tipped them off.”

  “That what?” Candace asks.

  “That we’re wanderer-hugging liberals.” Nora shivers. “Wonder what they’d do if we were voting on something really important?”

  “Lynch everyone who didn’t vote the way they wanted?” Candace climbs in the car, shaking her head.

  “There’s still time,” Harkness says.

  18

  “KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT the Harbormasters?” Harkness waits. Glenn stops in midstride in the elegant inner courtyard of the Boston Public Library, stares up at the red-tiled roof as if it holds the answer.

  “You mean historical or modern?”

  “Both,” Harkness says.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” Glenn starts walking slowly through the inner courtyard, its low trees wrapped in burlap, fountain turned off for the winter. Under the marble-arched colonnade, students tap away on laptops, eat sandwiches, smoke. Harkness smells weed, considers finding the source, but why bother? No one cares about weed anymore.

  “Let’s start with some history,” Glenn says. “Back in the early 1700s, before all the landfills made the city bigger, there used to be just one narrow path leading to Boston. A couple of guards stood on Boston Neck all day and night. If someone’s boat just came in or people wandered into the city through the forest from the west, they had to face the Masters of the Harbor.”

  “And?”

  “If they didn’t like what they saw or heard—maybe the stranger was a Quaker or a woman who looked wanton—they had a big cedar stake buried in the ground next to them, sharp side up, and they would just lift ’em up and drop ’em on the spike, then listen to ’em scream as they bled out, just for a chuckle. They left the rotting corpses on the stake for years as a warning.”

  “Beantown is a mean town,” Harkness says softly.

  “Definitely. Paul Revere rode past a pole skewered with stinking corpses on his way to Lexington and Concord. That’s the way Boston got started—the Masters of the Harbor picked who got to settle in the city and who got the spike. If they weren’t sure, they made the new arrival wear a noose around his neck for a year. If any little problem came up, they just used the convenient pre-tied noose.”

  “Vigilante justice.”

  “Except the Masters of the Harbor weren’t vigilantes,” Glenn says. “They were in charge. And here’s what you need to know, Eddy. They still are. They called themselves the Vault for a while—met in the vault of the Boston Safe Deposit Company once a month to plot the future of the city. Now they’re back to being the Harbormasters.”

  “Recognize any of these people?” Harkness hands Glenn a piece of paper with a couple dozen names on it, all of the names that the security guards out on the Northern Avenue Bridge gave him.

  “Well, there’s the mayor, of course,” Glenn says. “And Fayerwether.” He points. “Katherine Aiello used to be on the library board, way before I got here. I think she made all her money as an exec with Digital or Lotus. Something old.” He scans the rest of the list. “I kind of recognize some of the names. But I don’t know any of them. Who are they?”

  “The Harbormasters, circa now.”

  Glenn stops. “Whoa, you got a list of the Harbormasters? They’re supposed to be super-secretive. How’d you do that?”

  “Let a couple of security guards beat me up.”

  Glenn nods. “Probably worth it.”

  “So what do they do?”

  “I have no idea,” Glenn says.

  “We can assume they don’t toss people on spikes anymore.”

  “Don’t assume anything.” Glenn checks his watch. “I really have to get back to work, Eddy.”

  “How much longer are you going to be around?”

  “Three weeks,” Glenn says. “Maybe a little more. I appealed through the union. Getting rid of a city worker takes a while.”

  Harkness tries to imagine Glenn doing something else besides working in a library but can’t.

  “Talked to your girl Esther the other day,” Glenn says.

  “And?”

  “She’s almost weird and nerdy enough to work at the library.”

  “No argument here.”

  “Let her know that I think I tracked down a box of copies of the Lower South Ender in our Dedham archive. They’ll be here in a couple of days—I’ll text her when they come in. Mind telling me why a narcotics detective is taking such an interest in arcane chapters of Boston history?”

  “It all comes back to this.” Harkness takes out a folded Dark Horse packet from his wallet and hands it to Glenn.

  Glenn studies the blood-red horse with an intense gaze, then rubs the package between his fingers. “There’s something wrong with this,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  Back at Narco-Intel, Harkness hangs up his jacket and walks past Patrick’s cluttered cubicle.

  Patrick points to his office. “Warning. You got yourself a visitor.”

  Harkness looks across the room and sees the Two Stooges sitting in metal chairs on both sides of his office door. They raise their hands and wave in unison.

  “What does he want?” he says quietly.

  “No idea,” Patrick says. “Not a happy camper. Want me to break out that Scotch?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Commissioner Lattimore stands at Harkness’s office window, staring down at Copley Square. “Checking out crime novels on departmental time, Harkness?”

  “No, sir, doing some research.”

  “That’s what I hear.” Lattimore turns and gives Harkness a disappointed stare. “I’ve told you over and over, Harkness. It’s simple—Narco-Intel is about drugs. Finding drugs. Tracking down dealers. Stopping new drugs from hitting the market. Keeping users from dying. That’s what you and your team are getting paid to do. Not to go wandering off-mission. Not to go to the library. Or the jail. Or even to the Lower South End.”

  “Yes, sir.” Harkness wonders why Lattimore is taking such an interest in how he spends his time.

  “I looked at the data on Dark Horse over the weekend,” Lattimore says. “It’s dead in the water. No confirmed buys. No overdoses in weeks. Nothing. Time to let that one go. It was a sideshow. And now it’s over.”

  Harkness says nothing.

  “From your silence, I’m assuming you disagree.”

  “Remember Fire?” Harkness says.

  Lattimore shakes his head. “No.”

  “Club drug,” Harkness says. “Showed u
p right after ketamine but before that turbocharged version of MDMA.”

  “Why do we care about Fire?”

  “We thought no one would every buy Fire again after it killed off five people in a weekend. But it came back. With a vengeance. Knocked off a dozen students at an MIT frat. You know what I learned from Fire?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t keep a good drug down.”

  “Well, something’s keeping Dark Horse down,” Lattimore says. “And it looks like it’s going to stay down.”

  Harkness shakes his head. “Dark Horse is a category-killer. If it comes back, it’s going to wipe out all of the mom-and-pop brands of junk and take over the East Coast.”

  Lattimore says nothing.

  Harkness tries another angle. “Look, if Amazon sold heroin, it would be Dark Horse. Cheap. Powerful. Free two-day delivery to the morgue.”

  “I get it. I get it.” Lattimore holds up his hands. “If it were up to me, I’d just let you keep running with it. But the mayor’s team insists that we come up with some good news. Telling them that there’s super-heroin on the street isn’t exactly what they had in mind. They went through the Lower South End and took down all your posters. Said they made the city look bad.”

  “Look bad? We’re about to hit a thousand overdoses this year. That looks bad to me.”

  “Exactly,” Lattimore says. “The mayor doesn’t want to have a full-blown drug crisis during his first year in office.”

  Harkness has to laugh at this.

  “I know, I know,” Lattimore says. “It’s stupid posturing. Spinning a message. We ought to be admitting there’s a problem and running an awareness campaign to stop it. That’s the way I’d do it. But I’m not mayor. And I’m not exactly in the mayor’s good graces. I bet on the wrong guy. Did fundraisers for Sam Reed, for Chrissake.”

  “Campaign’s over,” Harkness says. “Time to move on. Just like you said.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, that’s not the way it works around here.” Lattimore stares at the floor. “Sometimes I wish I was young like you again, Harkness. At least you can pretend that the world is fair.”

  Harkness catches Lattimore and his entourage as they’re walking out of Narco-Intel. “One last question, sir.”

  Lattimore waves the Stooges on down the stairs, then turns to Harkness. “Yeah?”

  “Heard of the Harbormasters?”

  Lattimore’s face shifts from surprise to anger to exasperation. “I assume you’re not talking about the Boston Police Harbor Unit that patrols the harbor?”

  “No, I’m not talking about cops in boats.”

  “Do not tell me you’re fucking around with the Harbormasters.”

  “I don’t even know who they are, sir,” Harkness says. It’s almost true.

  “All I can say is they’re way above your pay grade, Harkness—and mine.” Lattimore looks up at the ceiling and takes a sudden interest in the water stains marking the tiles. “That’s all I got.”

  “Really?” Harkness is amazed to find that Lattimore isn’t a better liar after so many years in the public eye.

  “You won’t find out much about the Harbormasters, no matter where you look,” Lattimore says. “They’re not public. Kind of a private civic think tank, from what I know. Bunch of business leaders.”

  “So you do know something about them.” Nothing is unknowable in a post-secret world.

  “Look, they seem like a bunch of hail-fellows-well-met, as my father used say.”

  “I have no idea what that means,” Harkness says.

  “They’re just a bunch of high-powered businessmen who get together to drink and pretend like they control the city. Maybe more of the former than the latter.” The elevator door opens and Lattimore steps inside. “And Harkness?”

  “Sir?”

  “If you fuck with the Harbormasters in any way, I’ll fire you personally. On the spot. Despite my complete respect for you. Got that?”

  “Loud and clear, sir.”

  Harkness watches Lattimore and his crew marching down the stairs, then moves to a window to watch them walk down Boylston Street and climb in the black SUV.

  He turns and walks across the office, stands in the dead zone until Patrick notices and joins him. Harkness hands Patrick the list of Harbormasters. “Check these out.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Not sure,” Harkness says. “More important people we’re not supposed to bother.”

  “So what are we gonna do when we figure out who they are?”

  “Bother them.”

  19

  HARKNESS AND CANDACE stop at the pumpkin-carving tent, where adorable children and their less lovable parents shout instructions at high-school volunteers in orange sweatshirts, standing ankle-deep in pumpkin guts.

  “The eye! Make it more slinty.”

  “More teeth!”

  “Don’t forget the ears!”

  Candace lifts up May to look. “Since when do we outsource making jack-o’-lanterns?”

  “Can’t let kids use knives anymore,” Harkness says. “Legal thing. So they have volunteers do it for them. With guidance from the parents, of course.”

  “Wow. Such fun.”

  As they keep walking across the leaf-strewn Nagog Park, Harkness senses the layers of history becoming delaminated. When he was a kid, Harkness used to swim with George in the park’s outdoor pool, rigging up their towels as hammocks on the fence. He played baseball here back in high school. Now he’s walking with his girlfriend and her daughter, dressed in a puffy lime-green parka. Before nostalgia can take hold, he remembers why history is a continuum—it continues ahead. He takes May’s hand in his, then he and Candace lift May and swing her back and forth, triggering a burble of uncontrollable laughter.

  Ahead hovers an enormous red hot-air balloon shaped like an apple, the Nagog Home Team’s contribution to Harvest Days. Every few minutes, a fiery burner sends hot air roaring into the balloon, inspiring the apple to rise slowly.

  A line of townspeople snake up to the basket, which carries passengers about twenty yards above the field on long tethers. After letting the riders hover for a few minutes above the park, the Home Team minders haul in the rope and the next group rises slowly.

  “Ever wonder why some things get co-opted by other things?” Candace asks.

  “Like hot-air balloons and Realtors?”

  Candace thinks for a minute. “Green and decaf.”

  “Sunday and jazz.”

  “Bunnies and organic food.”

  “Maybe some things are just supposed to be together.”

  “Like me and you,” Candace says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t a question,” she says.

  As they walk through the fair, people in the crowd acknowledge their passing with lingering stares.

  Candace leans close to Harkness. “What’re they looking at?”

  “We look like the kind of people who voted pro-wanderer. Some of them are probably still holding a grudge.”

  “Town meeting was last month.”

  “People around here have long memories,” Harkness says.

  “People around here don’t have enough to do.”

  The vote did nothing to resolve the wanderer issue. It just split the town and brought media attention to Nagog, now a test case for community tolerance versus individual rights.

  They walk past a crowded booth flying a red flag that shows a red house and two crossed rifles. The hard-eyed men and women gathered around the American Landowners Alliance booth are chanting “Sign our petition, send the wanderers to perdition.”

  “That slogan doesn’t really work,” Candace says, but she gives a queasy shiver and lifts May to her shoulder. “Shit, Eddy. Those people look really pissed off.”

  “Dada, dada.” May reaches for Harkness and he takes her, holding her until they’re clear of the booth.

  “Here’s the friendly opposition.” Harkness points at a crowded booth with a hand-painted si
gn: HOST THANKSGIVING WITH A WANDERER! Earnest women, their gray hair bound in cruel braids, chat with a cluster of crusty wanderers.

  They keep walking through the fair until they hear shouting behind them. Harkness turns to see a skinny guy in an AC/DC shirt and thin leather jacket yelling at the people gathered around the American Landowners Alliance booth.

  Harkness’s internal alarm is blaring. “You two go on ahead for a minute.”

  “Eddy, you’re off duty.” Candace’s voice turns tight and small.

  “I think it’s Lee.”

  “The guy from the Nagog Five and Ten?”

  “Yeah.”

  Candace points at a petting zoo set up on the edge of the field. “We’ll be over there.”

  Lee jams his bony finger at the ALA booth. “Harvest Days is a Nagog tradition,” he shouts. “It’s for the people of this town. We don’t need you yahoos coming here and turning it all political.”

  A small crowd’s stalking around behind Lee, guys Harkness went to high school with, the kind who never left Nagog. There’s Steve Dawkins, who runs the town snowplow; Randy Dupraz, who helps out around the firehouse; and Royal Hilliard, whose family has an expensive neighborhood named after it. He works at the water-treatment plant. Behind them, a little older but just as lost, stands Hank Steadman, the town animal control officer.

  “Name’s Calvin Addison.” The guy standing in front of the booth has short hair and dark eyes and a face so flushed he looks like he might explode. “We’re allowed to be here.” Calvin’s wearing jeans, cowboy boots, an ALA T-shirt, and a way-too-small-to-zip red fleece vest. “We came all the way from Texas to tell folks that no one should oughta take your home away.” Even in the fall chill, sweat’s running down Calvin’s face.

  Lee and his band of friends stare at Calvin like he came all the way from another planet. Some iteration of this gang—swamp Yankees with thin skins and an overdeveloped sense of outrage—has roamed Nagog for centuries.

  Part fuck-up townie, part stalwart Nagog defender, Lee’s not giving up. “Butt out, sweaty dude,” he says. “Just leave. We don’t need you trying to get people more riled up than they already are.” Lee leans down and pretends to snatch one leg of the ALA table. He pauses, as if to say I’d never do that. Then his smile fades as he overturns the table, scattering their brochures, petitions, and T-shirts on the ground. Lee’s friends lunge forward to trash the booth.