Dark Horse

by Rory Flynn

  The cream-colored envelope is dotted with Reed’s blood. Harkness pushes it across the table. “Read this, Sam. It’s important.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, Eddy.” Reed tosses the letter in his briefcase. “I’ve had enough politics for today.”

  35

  JOEY INCAGNOLI HOLDS down his usual booth in the back of Mr. Mach’s Zero Room like a barroom diplomat, smoking a cigarette as he reads the Herald, glass of Cynar by his left hand, ashtray by his right.

  As Harkness walks across the bar, he notices little changes—the stained orange carpet has been pulled out and replaced with a polished wood floor, the bartenders standing in front of the glowing liquor bottles are young and clean-looking, not the drugged-out, borderline women that Mr. Mach favored back during the dark era when Harkness spent too much time here. He looks for Thalia. His ex used to be one of the bar’s most notorious bartenders. But she’s gone. And so is Mr. Mach, running from a human-trafficking indictment.

  Harkness can’t say he misses him.

  But Joey Ink’s different. He spent long evenings telling Harkness stories about his days with Ray Patriarca and the Angiulo brothers—most along the theme of how we beat those Irish fucks at their own game. The game being extortion. Joey seemed to enjoy telling an off-duty cop about all that he got away with, knowing that he was immune from prosecution thanks to a sweet deal with the FBI.

  Joey Ink smiles at Harkness and waves at the seat on the other side of the booth.

  “How are you, Joey?”

  He shrugs, holds up a silver device that looks like an old-school electric shaver. He swallows air, then touches the device to his throat. “Doing okay, Eddy.” The robotic words sound nothing like his old voice. “This thing’s called . . .” He pauses and swallows again. “An electrolarynx. Sucks.”

  “Sorry to hear you’ve had a hard time.”

  “They cut out my”—he pauses, swallows—“voice box.”

  “Really sorry.”

  Joey shrugs. “Everybody’s missing”—he pauses, swallows—“something.”

  There’s a lull, then Harkness turns to the business part of their meeting. “Came here to talk to you about your nephew.”

  Joey swallows, brings the device near again. “Anthony’s a good kid.”

  “Seems like it,” Harkness says. “But he’s in a lot of trouble.”

  Joey takes a contemplative sip of his Cynar, raises the device. “I heard.”

  A waiter comes over—a first in what used to be a stand-five-deep-at-the-bar-and-yell kind of place. Harkness orders a soda water with lime, which earns a raised eyebrow from Joey.

  “Cleaned up my act,” Harkness says. “Getting married.”

  “Congrats,” Joey buzzes. “Thalia?”

  “No.”

  Joey quiets at the memory of the nasty old days in the Zero Room. “Good.”

  “Here’s the deal, Joey. Your nephew’s facing two homicide charges and some serious prison time.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I can send him over to the DEA. They want him to roll on his dealers—he knows some big fish they’re interested in. If he does, they’ll probably let him off with short time. Maybe get him into witness protection.”

  “Anthony needs to . . .” He pauses. “Get out of town.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  “I need your help with a side project, I guess you’d call it.”

  Joey rolls his hand in front of him to rush Harkness to the point.

  “I need you to talk to your friend Nicco Malnati.” A low-profile North End kingpin, Malnati manages to keep getting elected to the city council term after term.

  He raises his device. “What about?”

  “A vote to throw out Mayor O’Mara.”

  Joey Ink smiles, raises his device. “I like.” He pauses. “That handsome.” Another pause. “Motherfucker.”

  “Look, I voted for him,” Harkness says. “But things have changed. Put in a word with Malnati and I’ll try to help Anthony.”

  “I’ll see.” He pauses. “What I can do.”

  All at once, a crowd of people in thick overcoats and scarves blow through the door of the Zero Room and commandeer the tables at the center of the room. They’re gawking at the sputtering neon signs, the empty fish tank next to the bathrooms with a flotilla of beer cans on its murky surface.

  “Wednesday night.” Joey pauses, swallows, raises the device again. “Dive Bar Tour.”

  That the Zero Room has become a tourist attraction seems impossible to Harkness. Then again, there’s a Rat Suite at the Commonwealth Hotel now, turning the city’s legendary punk club into an overpriced hotel room.

  Joey leans forward. “I’ll do what.” He pauses, swallows. “I can.”

  “Does Malnati owe you any favors?” Harkness finishes his soda water.

  Joey nods. “Plenty.”

  “Might be a good time to call them in.”

  “Don’t tell me.” Joey pauses, swallows. “What to do.”

  Harkness holds up his hands. “Got it.” He’d forgotten Joey’s ice-cold side. Even diminished, he exudes an aura of unalloyed bad. Just the kind of character the tour-goers probably love to see—from across the bar.

  The news on the flat-screen over the bar catches Harkness’s eye. RIOT BREAKS WINTER CALM IN NAGOG. He stands and picks up his coat from the back of his chair. Onscreen, hundreds of protesters carrying torches and signs swarm in front of a blue clapboard house. He recognizes the neighborhood—it’s across the street from the town ball field, where he used to spend every spring afternoon. They’re interviewing Watt, who squints at the camera, steaming clouds floating from his mouth as he talks to a reporter.

  The sound’s off, but Harkness can guess what’s happening.

  36

  SHOUTING WANDERERS MARCH in front of Buckholtz’s blue, two-story Colonial, the crowd lit by the flashing blue lights of Nagog Police cars and a couple of state police cruisers. Harkness ditches the brown Chevy in a snowbank next to the town ball field and rushes toward the house, flashing his badge to get past the Statie running perimeter.

  “Hell no, we won’t go! Hell no, we won’t go!” Hundreds of wanderers mill around Buckholtz’s snowy yard, along with neighbors and TV crews.

  Harkness finds Watt at the front of the crowd with a cluster of nervous Nagog rookies keeping the protesters away from the house.

  “Welcome to the circus.” Watt smiles. “The fun just never stops around here, Eddy.”

  “Town meeting was tonight, right?”

  “Right,” Watt says. “They voted to throw the wanderers out a couple of hours ago—by a landslide. WB added some choice comments at the end about what a relief it was to rid the town of freeloaders, freegans, and free-lovers. His words, not mine. And he gave a stern warning to the wanderers to clear out by midnight. So they all regrouped here in his yard. Kind of like a last stand.”

  “WB inside?”

  “Yeah, he’s hiding. I don’t think he’ll be coming out,” Watt says, then turns to shout at his men, “Listen up, let’s move the crowd another ten yards back.”

  They stretch their arms out and walk slowly away from the house. Harkness joins them. The wanderers back up willingly. They may be angry but they’re also tired and cold—and smart enough to know there’s nothing they can do to change tonight’s vote.

  The shouting rises suddenly. The front door is moving, pulled inside the dark house, then the storm door, clouded with frost, inches open.

  The shouts turn to jeers and booing as Buckholtz totters out, blinking when the TV crews switch on their lights. He’s wearing a dark blue bathrobe over his white pajamas and shuffles forward in unlaced L.L. Bean boots.

  The wanderers quiet a little when they see that the man they’re rallying against is so old, tired, and sad.

  Buckholtz wavers on the porch, his hunched shoulders rising and falling with his labored breathing. He’s muttering to himself or p
raying. Spectral, underpowered, he looks like he might slump into the snow at any moment.

  He snaps to, as if he’s thrown a hidden switch, made an irrevocable decision. He’s standing straight and tall now, peering out like a crow seeking shine. Buckholtz reaches beneath his bathrobe, pulls out a shotgun, and levels it at the crowd.

  Shouts turns to screams. The wanderers start to run as he fires both barrels in quick succession, the explosions echoing across the yard.

  The crowd scatters, slipping and falling, knocking over TV cameras and lights. Bodies drop in the snow. Buckholtz stands at the top of the stairs, smiling at the chaos he’s created. Then he tosses his shotgun down. It clatters on the icy sidewalk and he turns back toward his house.

  Watt bounds up the steps and tackles Buckholtz. He lifts him like a bag of laundry and drags him down the stairs. Buckholtz shouts as Watt cuffs him, something about the righteous needing no justification.

  Harkness shouts at the rookies,“Call in ambulances, now.” Then he rushes to the jumble of bodies on the ground. Some wanderers are sitting up, stunned. Others cluster around a body. Harkness walks closer and sees Jennet Townsend sprawled in the snow.

  Her speckled face is white and marked with grime, long hair tangled and wet from melting snow, eyes wide open, a front tooth chipped from her deadfall to the frozen ground. Her army surplus parka is half open and blood-slick.

  “You’ve got to help her!” James, her frantic brother, waves him forward with bloody hands.

  Harkness kneels down next to Jennet, pale and still. The wanderers step aside and Harkness lifts the coat to reveal two dark cavities in the center of her chest, the pale, shredded flaps of skin giving way to shimmering bone and deep red flesh. A wanderer hands him a T-shirt and Harkness folds it, presses it against the wounds, but it’s soaked with pooled blood in seconds.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he says to Jennet but knows it’s not. She’s already gone, staring up at the bare branches and the distant stars.

  Out on the street, the EMTs lift the stretcher into an ambulance. Harkness’s hands are dark with Jennet’s blood, his mind spinning. Around him, James, Mouse, and the remaining wanderers are crying and shouting. A tear drips down Harkness’s face and he wipes it away furiously with his sleeve.

  He leaves the group of mourners and walks over to the ambulance.

  “I need to see her.” He shows his badge.

  “Eddy, really. Don’t,” Watt calls out.

  “She was a friend of mine. Just give me a second,” he says to one of the EMTs, who nods and pulls back the heavy blanket to reveal Jennet’s narrow body, chest covered now with bloody gauze pads that do little to hide the wounds. An abandoned IV line trails from her arm.

  “She didn’t have a chance,” the EMT says. “Two barrels of heavy-grade birdshot to the chest. Died instantly.”

  Harkness stares at her lifeless body, tracing back the many decisions that led Jennet from the city to this bloodied small-town yard. Some were hers. But a thick vein of guilt runs through these thoughts. Did his advice about Nagog inspire Jennet to picket Buckholtz’s house? Should he have warned her how angry and twisted he was? He shakes his head, feels his soul pulled lower. Jennet died the way she lived, doing what she thought was right even when it wasn’t. The pale young woman on the stretcher was a survivor who didn’t survive, a streetwise innocent brought down by the latest bitter old man unable to control his rage.

  He reaches out to close her green eyes, feels her skin cold on his fingertips.

  The EMTs say nothing. They never do. They’re about stopping pain and death when they can, not explaining why it happened. One replaces the blanket and together they push the stretcher containing the still body that was once Jennet Townsend, good citizen of the Lower South End, into the back of the ambulance.

  The crowd is gone, leaving behind the professionals and ghouls. The cameramen have their video of Wade Buckholtz firing into the crowd, screaming wanderers scrambling to get away. The reporters finished their standups in front of the yard and broadcast the latest small-town tragedy.

  Disheveled from being tackled and cuffed, WB wears an orange emergency blanket over his bathrobe and leans heavily on his walker next to a Nagog cop. His paper-white face is twisted into a rictus of bafflement, and Harkness wonders if WB even realizes what he’s done. His thin gray hair sticks out and his eyes blink. He gives Harkness a sick smile and turns away slowly.

  “I want to talk to Buckholtz,” Harkness says when Watt walks closer.

  Watt’s breath steams in the cold. “We’ve questioned him already.”

  “Searched his house?”

  Watt shakes his head. “Not yet. Why?”

  Harkness nods, thinks of the strange look WB just gave him. “Let’s give it a once-over, just in case.”

  They hear the clocks first, dozens of them, all ticking away, out of sync like a crazed cartoon.

  “My grandma had one of those.” Watt points to a black-cased Waltham mantel clock. “Wonder if it’s worth something.”

  “Probably not,” Harkness says. “People always think their family stuff is special.” They walk carefully through the house, stopping at the waist-high tower of newspapers, each day of the Nagog Journal carefully unfolded and stacked.

  “Looks like WB’s lost it,” Watt says.

  “Oh yeah.”

  A handful of dim bulbs burning in a brass chandelier light the dining-room table, lined with row after row of Mason jars.

  “Really late to be canning,” Watt says, twisting open a jar. “Seems like—”

  “Don’t do that,” Harkness says, too late to stop Watt from taking a big sniff.

  “Sweet Mary, Mother of God.” Watt puts the lid back on the jar. Each is carefully inscribed in black marker with the date and time. He moves away from the table and puts his hands on his knees to dry retch. “What kind of man archives his piss?”

  “And that’s not all.” Harkness points to some darker shadows floating in some of the jars.

  “I’m calling that TV show, Hoarder’s Heaven,” Watt says. “No one’s going to believe this.”

  “Sure they will.”

  “WB’s wife must have kept him out of the weeds.”

  “Kept him from shooting people,” Harkness says.

  “So that’s why people get married?”

  “That would be one of the reasons. And a good one.”

  “I’m sorry.” The voice is so soft that Harkness barely hears it as he’s about to get in the Chevy. Then he sees the dark figure hunched next to the car.

  “What do you want?” Harkness peers into the gloom, feels his right hand tingle, awake and ready to reach for his Glock.

  The stranger pulls off his knitted cap to reveal his smoke-bush hair. Mouse, shivering and whimpering. Harkness nods to the passenger door.

  “Get in,” Harkness says. “Let’s have a little talk.” He twists the key in the ignition and the Chevy roars to life.

  The passenger door opens slowly and Mouse slumps into the seat.

  “This car may not look like much, but the heater really works.” Harkness twists the fan knob to spread the warm air.

  “It’s all my fault.” Mouse lowers his head into his chapped hands.

  “What?”

  “I’m the one who told Jennet about that stupid Nagog law,” Mouse says. “She started the wanderer movement. And now she’s dead.”

  “Hold on a second,” Harkness says. “From what I know, a guy at the library gave you the information about Nagog because Robert Fayerwether asked him to. So you’re more of a go-between in this story, Mouse. But definitely go ahead and feel as guilty as you want.” Harkness pulls off his gloves and rubs the missing end of his index finger. It always goes numb in the cold.

  “Just arrest me, man.” Mouse juts both his arms toward Harkness, waiting for the handcuffs. “I’m done.”

  Harkness peers across the front seat. “Don’t think so.”

  “You said there’s still
a warrant out for me,” Mouse says. “So arrest me. I want everything to be over. No more shooting and shit, man. Jennet was always on me to clean up my act. Said real activists can’t be shady.”

  “I have other plans for you,” Harkness says. “Help me out and I’ll make sure your warrant goes away. It’s important—Jennet would be proud of you. I’m sure of it.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Mouse leans across the seat and Harkness smells damp wool and stale weed.

  “Know the story of Exodus?”

  “Kinda.”

  “You’re going to be Moses,” Harkness says. “You’ve already got the beard for it.”

  37

  BY THE TIME Harkness gets home, it’s after two in the morning and the snow has picked up, tiny flakes sifting down steadily like powdered sugar to cover the old gray snow. He unlocks their apartment door and opens it slowly, trying not to wake Candace and May.

  The apartment blazes with light—the television’s on with no sound and Candace’s laptop is open, the news unspooling onscreen. She and Nora decided to skip town meeting since polls showed the wanderers losing by more than 20 percent. But it looks like she’s been monitoring the news from Nagog all night.

  Candace lies curled up on the living room rug, a blanket pulled over her.

  Harkness puts his hand on her shoulder and shakes her gently. He’s reaching down to carry her into the bedroom when she opens her eyes, pulls her arm back, and slaps Harkness in the face with her good hand.

  “It’s me,” Harkness says.

  “I know.” Candace pulls her hand back and slaps him again and again until he catches her wrist.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.” She pulls away and stands, backing up slowly, eyes glinting, tear-lined face twisted with rage.

  “Been drinking or something?”

  “No drinks, weed, pills, nothing.” Candace stalks to her laptop and comes back, holding it open toward Harkness. “Look what someone e-mailed me.”

  On the screen, Harkness sees the sunlit interior of the rehabbed garage. Jennet Townsend lies sprawled on the platform bed, top off, breasts set free, an expansive smile on her face. Harkness stares from the edge of the photo, taken from somewhere up in the ceiling.