“He’s going to kill his guys just because they got hurt?” I looked at Susan. I remembered Cline’s words: So what does a guy do when all his men have proved to be useless to him?
“I think you can bet on that,” Susan said. “When your men fail you, you clean house.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY
“DRUG LORDS DON’T offer health insurance,” Susan said. “While the injured men are out of action, they’ll need to be paid to keep quiet or they’ll be easy pickings for cops who want to question them, make offers.”
I gripped my head, squeezed my eyes shut. Cline was right. I hadn’t won; I’d just put more people in his firing line.
“You don’t know this for sure,” I said to Susan. “You’re just guessing.”
“Think about it.” She shrugged. “We’ve got Turner and Russ approaching the house in the middle of the night, armed and hostile. If we can’t prove attempted murder, we can at least go for weapons charges, assault, breaking and entering. With their records, which are likely to be extensive, they’ll do serious time. Then there are Bones and Simbo, who will be charged with kidnapping, assault, and attempted murder for what they did to Clay. Some or all of them will trade what they know about Cline for a better deal.”
“They could get a lot of time off for being helpful,” Malone mused. “They could argue that Cline intimidated them and coerced them into coming for us. They might get by with no jail time, or they could make a play for a minimum-security prison and witness protection after.”
“But surely Cline’s not going to come for them himself,” I said. “He’s a coward. He hasn’t stepped out from behind his thugs since we’ve known him.”
“He hasn’t had to,” Nick said. “But if we’re right, these guys are just liabilities now. They better have security on their hospital-room doors. And not the local cops either. We know they’re dirty.”
The table fell silent. A group of young women were crowded around the old jukebox nearby, laughing and play-fighting over the music choices. Their happiness stood in stark contrast to the mood of the people around me.
“There are going to be more deaths,” I said. I felt the truth of it in my bones. “Unless we stop Cline ourselves somehow, those four men are on the chopping block.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
NICK AND SUSAN ordered dinner, but I couldn’t eat. I stood on the deck outside the bar and looked at the lights of Gloucester and the soft slope of the hill toward the water where the blinking port lights guided men home from the sea. I thought about Doc’s words, his warnings about me suddenly removing the master of pain from the town and leaving the addicts who relied on him in the lurch. There would be men on the boats who used Cline’s products to get through the relentless hours and backbreaking work of lobster and crab fishing off the coast, the brutal life they led trying to feed their families on the shore. How many people would be left desperate and sick if I took Cline out of the equation? And how long would it be before someone else took his place, preying on the young, the hurting, the hungry of our town with his deadly cocktails? I was deep in my thoughts when Malone appeared beside me, his face a welcome light cutting through my brooding.
“I don’t know what you’re doing sulking out here,” he said. “I’d be in there with that lady if I were you.”
“Who? Susan?”
“‘Who? Susan?’” he repeated, imitating me. He laughed. “I’ve seen you looking at her, Bill. I’ve seen her looking at you. I’ve been dodging fireworks across the table all night.”
I felt heat creeping into my collar. “Is it really that obvious? I guess Nick must know, then. Maybe they all know.”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t—” I laughed, feeling stupid. “I don’t know! I’ve kissed her once. With everything that’s been going on, I haven’t even had the chance to ask her if … if it was just a random moment or … ” I opened my hands. “She said she’d wanted me to. But what does that mean? Was she talking about right then or has she been thinking about it for longer?”
“Look at you.” Malone grinned. “You can’t even talk about it!”
“I can’t talk about it,” I agreed, trying to cool my cheeks with the palms of my hands. He leaned on the rail beside me, and for a moment we looked just like we had years ago, two patrol cops marking time at the end of a night, watching boats in the city harbor.
“You remember that bomb threat we caught at the Meritage?” he asked, already grinning at the memory. I did. Malone and I had been newly assigned partners on patrol, tasked with assisting the Secret Service for the visit of an ex-president to Boston for Veterans Day. The president had been rushed out of the restaurant halfway through his spaghetti marinara when someone spotted a brown paper bag another diner had left under one of the nearby tables. A bomb threat had been called in to the president’s hotel that morning, so the Secret Service agents were taking no chances. The entire building and half the waterfront were evacuated. Malone and I were told to go up to the restaurant and check that everyone was out, and like an idiot, I got curious about the package and decided to see if I could get a glimpse of what was inside the bag.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said now, watching Malone as he tried not to laugh his ass off. “Maybe I thought I might have been able to hear it ticking or something.”
“You were a hero.” Malone laughed. “A true hero of the people.”
I’d gotten very close to the bag on that fateful day, and I was so young and brazen that I’d reached out to see if I could open the bag and see inside. When my fingers were mere inches away, the bag moved.
“When that bag moved—” Malone was slapping the deck railing, laughing so hard he couldn’t finish his sentence.
When the bag moved, I’d fallen back with a terror so sudden and all-consuming I’d almost fainted. The bag contained not a bomb meant to assassinate the president but two huge live Dungeness crabs that someone had obviously bought at the local market and planned to take home for dinner. When I’d recovered enough to stand, Malone and I had taken the crabs, their pincers bound, down to the waterfront to show the former president. The papers got a shot of me kneeling on the dock, clipping the creatures free of their bindings before I released them into the harbor.
While the Globe had been quite mature about it, other newspapers had a good time with the story. One headline read “Cops Catch Crabs; President Scuttles Away.” I still had the newspaper clipping somewhere.
“I wonder if those crabs are alive now,” I said as Malone tried to recover from the hilarity. “How long do crabs live?”
“I don’t know. But if they’re alive, they’re probably still telling that story.”
“Over drinks at their underwater crab bar,” I said. “The Claw, it’s called. I went there once. Nice place. A bit wet.”
“Jesus.” Malone sighed, watching the lights in the distance. “That was so much fun. We had a good time, didn’t we? We were a great team.”
“We’re still a great team.” I nudged him in the ribs, feeling how hard and prominent they were beneath his shirt. As though he could sense my concern, Malone turned to me.
“Look, there’s something I’ve got to tell you,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I didn’t just come up here to hang out, to see the place. I wanted to know you’d forgiven me, because if you hadn’t, I wanted to fix it before it was too late. I’ve got cancer, Bill. It’s terminal.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
I LISTENED TO Malone tell me about his illness for as long as I could, then I crossed the bar to the restrooms to wash my face. I looked over at Susan, perhaps an involuntary reflex, my mind seeking comfort. She seemed to notice my distress, but I waved her off. I knew that if she asked me what was going on, I wouldn’t be able to put it into words. Malone was leaving me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Just like Siobhan had. And Marni. And Doc. I needed a minute to close my eyes and think.
I turned the corner to the hall where the re
strooms were and saw a man with sweat-slick hair and grimy clothes carrying a stack of boxes toward the back door of the pub. He turned and caught my eye and nodded his head toward the door.
“Dude,” he said. “Could you …”
I already had my hand on the doorknob of the men’s room. In my sadness, my stupor, I didn’t see the danger lurking.
“Sure thing,” I mumbled. I pushed past him and opened the door. As I stepped out into the dark, he set the boxes down, came out, and slammed the door closed behind us. Another figure emerged out of the night and shoved me into the wall.
“Don’t move, shitbird!” a voice snarled.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
I SHOVED BACK at the second figure, who was just a silhouette in the dark. In a moment I realized it was a woman, and I felt a pang of regret as she stumbled away from me.
“Hey! Hands off, asshole!” the guy who’d been carrying the boxes said.
“Hands off?” I pushed him. “What the hell is this?”
The moon emerged from behind a cloud and I caught a slice of his face. I recognized him now—it was the gardener I had seen at the side of Cline’s house the day Nick and I confronted him.
“This is a thank-you.” He stuck his finger in my face. “My partner and I have been on Mitchell Cline for three months. You and your idiot friends cost us the biggest drug bust in Massachusetts history last night.”
The realization of what was happening was like a punch to the gut. “You’re undercover cops?”
“Boston PD,” the woman said. She was stocky and square-jawed and had small, mean eyes. “We’ve been brought in because the locals are on Cline’s payroll.”
I struggled to comprehend what they were saying, my mind still reeling from Malone’s revelation and the sneaky maneuver the two of them had used to get me outside the bar. I supposed they knew one of Cline’s men could be inside watching me and they didn’t want to blow their cover. Someone tried the door behind me, but the male cop butted it shut with his shoulder.
“What’s your goddamn problem with Boston PD, Robinson?” The male edged closer to me, his face now just inches from mine. I could smell nicotine gum on his breath. “You trying to fuck up our operation as revenge for getting canned by the commissioner?”
“Back off.” I shoved him away. “I didn’t know you geniuses had an undercover operation going. Are you seriously posing as Cline’s gardeners? What are you doing, peering in his windows and watching him eat breakfast while you prune his rosebushes?”
“That’s as close as we’ve been able to get,” the woman said. “Cline handpicks his crew from the streets, and they sweep the house daily for bugs. He never interacts with anyone but his soldiers, and when they’re outside the house, they never talk shop.”
“We’ve sent in potential crew members, prostitutes, corrupt cops looking to get onto his payroll,” the man said. “We even flipped the guy’s cousin and sent him in for a friendly family visit wearing a wire. Nothing. This guy won’t even discuss his business with his own flesh and blood. Just to get in as gardeners, we had to construct foolproof fake identities, and all we get to listen to day in and day out is the shitty music his people play in the backyard while we pull up his weeds. We can’t get anywhere near Cline.”
“The drug boat was going to be our big payoff.” The woman poked me hard in the chest. “And you fucked it up.”
Nick, Malone, and Susan came running around the side of the bar; they must have sensed something was wrong. Nick and Malone were reaching for their guns, causing the two cops to reach for theirs, but I stepped between the two sides, my arms out. “Stop! Stop! It’s okay.”
“Who the hell are these pricks?” Nick got right up in the male cop’s face; they were nose to nose, as if they were two wolves fighting over food.
I explained the situation as both parties stood glaring at each other.
“If you knew the drug boat existed, why didn’t you just hit it?” Nick shook his head.
“We had a tracker in one of the tubs of product,” the female cop said. “We had another one on Cline’s car. We were waiting for the two to meet. We were going to jump on him then, but you idiots dumped it all into the sea.”
“We were trying to protect our town,” I said. “We want this guy out of here as much as you do.”
“Yeah, well, you just did him a favor,” the woman said, taking a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket and sticking one in her mouth. “And you—” She looked at Susan. “I’d have expected more from a fed. You let these guys go running around like vigilantes while you sit back and write stories about circus hamsters for the local rag?”
“Circus hamsters?” I looked at Susan.
She rolled her eyes. “A local kindergartner taught his hamster to walk a tightrope he made out of shoelaces. I needed a feel-good filler.” She turned to the undercovers. I could see a new tension in her face. “You shouldn’t have that information,” Susan said. “Who gave you approval to do a background check on me? I’m not a part of your investigation!”
“You became a part of it when this guy”—the woman gestured to me—“turned up and put a potted plant through the windshield of Cline’s car. We wanted to know who we were dealing with. Turns out it’s a bunch of renegade dumb-asses.”
“These dumb-asses have done more damage to Cline in two days than you have in months,” Susan said. “Take a look at yourselves before you go insulting them.”
The female cop came toward me. Though she had to look up at me, she was still intimidating, her features hard and taut.
“Stay off Cline.” She poked me again. “Or you’ll find yourself sharing a jail cell with him.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
SIMBO COULDN’T BELIEVE it had come to this. He sat on the edge of the motel bed and looked at his hands. They were still trembling. This was not how it was supposed to go. He’d been with Cline for three years and never slipped, never gotten himself tangled up in a felony arrest that would be worth betraying his boss to squeeze out of. Cline had made it clear from the beginning: If you go down for serious time, you’re dead. It didn’t matter if Simbo decided to trade Cline in. The man was going to come for him in any case.
The police had come after him, of course. Within minutes of Simbo arriving at the hospital with a concussion due to the door inside the Inn opening in his face, there were two cops standing at the end of his bed. They were Boston undercovers who looked familiar, for some reason, a man and a woman with the keys to his handcuffs. Simbo had told them what they wanted to hear, made them promises, waited until their backs were turned, and split. He wouldn’t turn Cline in. Maybe that would help when the man came for him.
Maybe he’d make an exception as he had before.
Cline never hired users. It was another one of his policies. Simbo went to the filthy motel bathroom now and stared at himself in the cracked mirror, tried to breathe through the nausea. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on Cline, a face in the back seat of a shiny black Escalade watching through the window as Simbo beat a homeless man half to death with a tire iron. The man had come for Simbo’s stash, which Simbo had spent the whole day getting, kneeling between the legs of men in business suits in expensive cars, using his body and his mouth because he had nothing else to offer. Simbo had thought Cline was just another one of these men indulging their secret desires on the way home to the wife and kiddies. But instead, Cline had been the one offering something—a way out, a use for the violence and fury Simbo was so accustomed to.
Simbo washed his face, tried to stay calm. He went and opened the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he had brought with him, drank half of it in nervous, jittery gulps, watching the television without really seeing it. After a while, he pulled back the curtain at the front of the motel room, checked the parking lot. Empty. He crawled into bed and lay wide-eyed in the dark, twitching at sounds in the street.
He didn’t know he was asleep until he felt the man land on him. Simbo tried to roll ov
er, but Cline had braced his legs on either side of him. He felt the scratch of something plastic coming down past his nose and then a loop pull tight around his throat. “You knew the rules,” Cline said.
Simbo grabbed at the zip tie, buried so deep in the flesh of his neck that his fingers could only scrabble at the band impotently while the pain rushed to his head. Sounds were coming out of him that he didn’t recognize, but the noise of his choking was soon drowned out by the blood screaming in his ears. He fell off the bed, thrashed and kicked, his limbs out of control, refusing to pull him toward the door. Cline flicked the light on and stood there watching, his arms folded. Simbo’s whole body was convulsing violently. The seconds ticked by. Cline got bored and glanced around the room at the peeling veneer of the particleboard cabinets, the moldy floral curtains. In the street, a homeless man was yelling at someone; an ambulance rolled by, sirens wailing.
Cline’s gaze returned to Simbo as he spasmed and flailed violently on the floor, taking his time to die. “Look at this place.” Cline smirked. “You didn’t end up very far from where you started.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
SUSAN CLIMBED INTO my car when we left the bar. Malone wanted to get some supplies for home, and he and Nick headed into town. My thoughts were so tangled as I drove along the wooded roads toward the Inn that I couldn’t keep track of what Susan was saying. Had I done the right thing in starting all this with Cline? People were dying, and he remained in our town in his castle on the hill, like Dracula preying on the villagers below him, trying to decide whose blood he wanted next. Susan put her hand on my leg and I found myself squeezing it, the way I had done with Siobhan so long ago.
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