It was a male voice, muffled slightly but clear enough. Though it was immediately familiar, Miller couldn’t quite place it, not yet. Remaining silent, he did the only thing he could do—he continued to stay put.
“Miller, it’s Spadaro,” the voice said. “Open up.”
So, the pounding of a man with a badge after all, Miller thought. Still, he didn’t answer. No way now.
“Look,” Spadaro said, “your truck is parked around back, and I doubt you went out for a walk, on a night like this, with that knee of yours, so I’m fairly certain you’re in there.” A pause, then: “It’s important, Tommy. Okay? I think you know I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
Miller closed his eyes, reopened them. Somebody was dead, or dying—why else would Spadaro be here? The question, then, was who? Miller and Spadaro had only one person in common, a dear friend Miller hadn’t seen in a while. A long while. So maybe this had something to do with her. At this moment Miller couldn’t think of any other reason for Spadaro to be here.
Finally, Miller said, “Yeah, all right.” His voice, rough-sounding, was full of concession. It took a real effort for him not to slur his words. “Hang on.”
He took the time required to cross the large front room to focus, pull himself out of the muck—warm, comforting, but muck nonetheless—that the painkillers made of him. He reached the door, flipped the dead bolt, then gripped the antique glass knob, cold against his palm, and turned it, pulling the door open. He wanted to give a clear sign to Spadaro that this needed to be quick, so he remained in the doorway. Leaning against the door frame, Miller tried to look as much as possible like a man who had been roused from sleep, and nothing else. Spadaro didn’t need to know about the current game with painkillers that was being played. No one did.
“What’s up?” Miller said.
Spadaro looked at him, studying his face. “You all right?”
“Yeah. I was sleeping. What do you want?”
Spadaro wasn’t in uniform tonight, was instead wearing jeans and a red-and-black checkered jacket, a hunter’s jacket, and dark sneakers. He was in his mid-thirties, had black hair, curly but thinning, and a square face. He was as tall as Miller but not as powerfully built, stood now with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket and his legs apart slightly. A cop’s authority, even in street clothes. But Miller was used to that, had seen it in his father, and all of his father’s friends, had grown up surrounded by it, among it.
Spadaro glanced past Miller, into his apartment. “Anyone in there with you?”
“You said this was important.”
“I just need to know if we’re alone or not, Tommy.”
“Yeah, we’re alone.”
He nodded but was still looking, not that he could see much since Miller all but filled the doorway. Finally he focused on Miller again. “You up for a ride?”
“Not really.”
“Too bad. I was sent to get you, bring you somewhere.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Has anything happened to Kay?”
“Not that I know of,” Spadaro said. “Why don’t you grab your shoes and coat.”
“What do you mean, not that you know of?”
“Don’t give me a hard time, Tommy. I don’t like this any better than you do, trust me.”
“Am I under arrest?”
Spadaro looked closely at Miller’s eyes. After a moment he glanced down at Miller’s knee, then looked up again. Miller knew by this that his eyes were glassy, his pupils dilated. How could they not be? How could Spadaro, even in this dim light, not see that?
“Just get your things, Tommy,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of time.”
Miller didn’t know Spadaro all that well, but he assumed that if something had happened to Kay, if she was hurt or needed help, Spadaro wouldn’t be behaving in this manner, would have just come out and said that she was in trouble. Concern for her well-being was the one thing they had in common. Something else, then, was going on, had to be. Miller remembered the sirens he had heard hours ago, moving away from town, toward the west, realized that if not Kay, then there would be only one other person on whose behalf Spadaro would be acting.
“Tell him you couldn’t find me,” Miller said.
“Can’t do that. Please just get your things. As a favor to me.”
Miller waited a moment, then said finally, “Yeah, all right. Hang on.” He stepped away from the door, grabbed his shoes off the floor. Black Skecher’s, half sneaker, half boot. Slip-proof sole, steel-toed, years old but still new-looking. Bending down just now to pick them up told Miller not to try to put them on standing up, so he sat down on the coffee table just a few feet from the open door. Spadaro stepped into the doorway but made a point of not crossing through it. A sign of respect, maybe. Or the caution of a cop concerned about contaminating a crime scene? Miller wasn’t sure which. Spadaro stood there and watched as Miller began to tie the laces of his sneakers.
“You all right there, Tommy?”
Miller knew his wobbliness was showing. But the cat was already out of the bag. He nodded, said nothing. Spadaro stayed where he was, watching Miller. When he was done lacing up his shoes, Miller stood, carefully, focused everything he had on the way he moved, trying his best to do so with some degree of fluidity. Spadaro knew, certainly, but he didn’t need to know how bad, how far away from the world Miller really was.
A military field jacket lay across the arm of his nearby couch. It was old, worn, a hand-me-down. Above the left pocket was a patch with the name Hartsell stenciled on it in faded black letters. Miller picked it up, put it on.
“I’ll follow you in my truck,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Spadaro stated flatly. “From the look of you, the last place you should be right now is behind the wheel. Besides, it’s getting pretty bad out.”
“I’m fine, Ricky.”
“Sure you are. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Your truck stays here.”
“Why?”
“Because it does. C’mon, Tommy. Like I said, there isn’t a lot of time.”
Miller followed him down the dark stairwell, holding on to the railing tight, then through the rotting door and out into the night. Nothing to hold him up out there. It was cold, and the rain was gone for now, but, again, the mist was enough. They crossed the wide street, climbed into Spadaro’s Bronco. It was warm inside, more so than back in Miller’s apartment. A place so open was difficult to keep comfortable in the winter, so he had given up a long time ago, got used to the chill, the edge. He sank into the passenger seat, sank deep, his jacket wrapped around him. He was feeling much heavier now than his two hundred pounds. He knew he would feel that way for the next few hours. If only he had waited to take his last pill, he’d be fine right now. In pain, but fine. In his current condition, though, pain probably would have been an advantage. Kept him clearheaded, keenly alert. Nothing cut through like pain. But he had taken that pill, and he was at a disadvantage now, this much at least was clear. It would take all he had to hide his weakness. Weaknesses. Wherever it was they were going, whatever it was Spadaro and whoever had sent him wanted, Miller would need to do at least that.
He checked his watch. It was just past ten.
Spadaro drove them through the village. At one point Miller thought they were heading for the new police station, but Spadaro made a left instead of a right onto Windmill Lane, then a right onto Hill Street. They were heading west now, in the same direction as the sirens Miller had heard hours before.
Once they were clear of the village Miller looked over at Spadaro. He couldn’t remember ever having seen Spadaro in anything other than his cop’s uniform. In street clothes he looked like a different man, but that had always been the case for Miller; his father had almost always been in uniform, but those times when he wasn’t, he seemed just a bit out of place in the world, somehow reduced. Spadaro looked a little like that now.
“You make detective?” Miller said
.
Spadaro shook his head. “No. It’s my night off. I got called in. By the chief.”
Miller nodded, thinking about that. He looked ahead, through the windshield. The edges of the glass were still dappled with raindrops. “Last I knew you were on the top of his shit list.”
“Still am. No offense, but chauffeuring you around is a shit job.”
Roffman was like that. When you were on his shit list, you knew it, were never allowed to forget it, in fact. Miller had been on that list for years.
“So where are we going?” he said
“The canal.”
“What’s at the canal?”
“A double homicide.”
So someone was dead after all, Miller thought. He considered all this. He considered, too, the fact that he had been taken out of his apartment in the middle of the night by an off-duty cop, the only cop in the entire department with whom he was on anything close to friendly terms. There was only one question that arose from these thoughts.
“Any idea what this has to do with me?”
Spadaro shook his head. “Thought you’d tell me.”
“Who’s in charge at the scene?”
“Mancini is head detective, but from what I can tell, it’s the chief who’s calling the shots tonight.”
“Roffman’s there?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s . . . unusual.”
Spadaro nodded. “A little bit, yeah.”
Miller looked out the passenger door window then, saw that the top halves of the ancient trees lining this side of Hill Street were completely lost in the descending cloud. The large houses beyond them were barely visible, too, looked to Miller like ships receding into a bank of fog. It was then that the Bronco came to Moses Lane, the street on which Miller had grown up. He glanced down it as they passed, couldn’t make out his former home only three driveways down. He had lived there with his mother and father till they were killed—his father by hired killers, his mother, two years later, by cancer—then had lived there alone for many years, till Abby showed up and moved in with him. She had stayed with him till he sold the house and had moved with him to the apartment by the train station.
She was everywhere in this town, everywhere he went, in everything he saw, or, in tonight’s case, couldn’t see. Even now, years after she had left him, and riding with Spadaro to meet Chief Roffman at the scene of a double murder, Miller was thinking of her, wondering where she was, what she was doing right now, if she was, at this moment, happy and safe.
Always there, on any given day, just a sight or sound or thought away.
They were passing the college, about to enter the Shinnecock Hills, when Miller said, “Any idea who’s dead?” His voice was quiet, almost solemn. He sounded to his own ears like exactly what he was: a man who had to ask the question but wasn’t at all certain he wanted to hear the answer.
Spadaro shook his head. “No.” His frustration was clear. After a moment he said, “All I know is that the two victims are male. White, in their early twenties. Apparently the whole thing is a fucking sight to see.”
Miller nodded at that, thought of asking what that meant exactly, a fucking sight to see, but didn’t. He’d know soon enough. He said nothing more as the Bronco followed the curving road west though the low hills. Every turn tugged at him, pulling him deeper into the passenger seat. The blue flame in his chest burned steady and warm, and his lips tingled as though he had been kissed roughly for hours.
Always there, Abby was, just a thought or two away.
Even before they reached the bridge Miller saw the lights. Unnatural, garish even, glowing white beneath a thickening ceiling of fog. A brighter than usual canal up ahead, which meant police floodlights, a lot of them, by the look of it. A full-fledged investigation, not that a double homicide didn’t call for that, but this was Southampton and the police were, at times, peculiar. As the Bronco approached the bridge, the bright white loomed, filling the windshield. Like a flash of lightning that, instead of ending, endured. It was, Miller knew, more than enough light for him to be seen by, and seen clearly, for anyone at the scene to determine by a mere look at him his current condition and its likely cause.
No place to hide.
He was used to that, hiding in his apartment, having little reason to leave it, and when he did, rarely going farther than the restaurant below. And now this. If it had been any cop but Spadaro. But, of course, that was why the chief had sent Spadaro.
Crossing over the bridge, Miller glimpsed from the passenger door window the access road below, saw the floodlights set up in a wide circle around the crime scene. He remembered the last murder scene he had been to, felt a chill move suddenly through him at just the memory of it. A dull chill, though, thanks to the medication. Once off the bridge, Spadaro turned onto Newtown Road, steered past the building that had once been a bar called the Water’s Edge. Miller looked at it—windows boarded over, parking lot empty, just a solemn hulk standing a lonely guard along the canal. Passing this close to that building made him just a little nervous, and this surprised him. He tended to want to keep his promises, even the promises he hadn’t ever fully understood, promises that couldn’t by now matter, not anymore, not after so many years. Still, straying this close now to a place he had promised to steer clear of felt a bit like betrayal, a bit like brushing close to something that was fiercely dangerous.
The first right past the Water’s Edge was Holzman Street, which connected Newtown Road with the access road that ran parallel to the canal. A police barricade was blocking Holzman, two patrol cars parked at angles behind it, their blue and red lights flashing. Two uniformed cops were standing by the open driver’s door of one of the cruisers. They turned to face the approaching Bronco, one of them holding up his hand to indicate to the driver that he should halt. But Spadaro was already pulling over to the shoulder. He parked, kicked in the emergency brake, and killed the motor and lights.
“We’ll have to walk from here,” he said.
Outside, the cold, damp air felt good on Miller’s face. Bracing. He needed that. He sunk his hands into the pocket of his field jacket and walked beside Spadaro toward the barricade. The cops looked at Spadaro, then at Miller. The looks on their faces were the same no matter who they were looking at. It was clear—made clear by hard stares—that these cops held Spadaro and Miller in more or less the same low regard. Contempt, even.
Not the warmest of welcomes, but Miller hadn’t expected one.
Directly ahead, at the end of the block, was the canal. The fog hanging a dozen or so feet above the water reflected the harsh white of the floodlights, creating a sharp glare that almost hurt Miller’s eyes. He squinted against it as they approached. The painkillers, no doubt, his pupils dilated. When they reached the end of Holzman they stopped, stood shoulder to shoulder. To their right, not far down the access road, was the support pillar of the train bridge. Made of stone, wet from the rain, it shimmered like a monument in the bright lights. Around it was yellow police tape. Within the perimeter made by the tape, near the footing of the pillar, lay two bodies. Miller’s eyes went straight to them, he couldn’t help it. He looked for a moment, almost sheepishly, then turned his attention away.
A half dozen cops were standing along the outer edge of the tape, their backs to Miller and Spadaro. Spadaro told Miller to wait where he was, then approached them. Four of them were uniformed, wearing bright orange slickers and hats covered with clear plastic bonnets. The other two wore street clothes—one a long black overcoat, the other a tan horseman’s jacket. Even with their backs to him, Miller was able to recognize Detective Mancini and Chief Roffman.
They turned as Spadaro approached. He spoke to Roffman, but Mancini listened closely. Miller was too far away to hear what was being said, so he stood there, watched and waited. Every one of the uniformed cops turned and looked back at him. The looks weren’t unlike the ones he had gotten from the two cops back at the roadblock. Miller noticed then that one of the unifor
med cops was a woman. Tall, slender, a thick strand of wet hair hanging from beneath her cap, dangling in front of her face. As she looked at him she reached up with her left hand and brushed the stray strand away, tucking it behind her ear. The resemblance was striking, but of course this wasn’t Kay. She had quit the force a year or so ago, all but been forced to. Roffman had obviously replaced her. He obviously, too, had a very specific type.
Miller looked back at the three men in street clothes. Roffman was in his mid-fifties, Mancini about the same, maybe a little older. The chief was tall but slimly built, had been considered, back when he came on after Miller’s father was murdered, as more of an administrator than an actual cop. He had promised to end the deep corruption that had plagued his predecessor’s department, but it didn’t take long at all for rumors of all new levels of corruption to emerge.
Mancini was one of the first cops Roffman had brought in. Built a little like a bull—solid, from his shoulders straight down—he was an experienced street cop, everything Roffman wasn’t. He had quickly become Roffman’s right-hand man. Right now Roffman was talking to his detective, who was listening and nodding, his eyes, though, fixed on Miller. Roffman talked for a while, then finally said something to Spadaro that Spadaro clearly didn’t like. He shook his head, as if in disbelief, looked down at his feet. Roffman took a step toward him, was inches from him now, spoke again, this time sternly. Spadaro looked up from his feet and toward the two bodies, then back at Roffman. When Roffman was done talking, Spadaro turned away and started back to Miller.
The Water's Edge Page 6