Third Rail (25 page)

Once the deer have passed, Harkness drives down the trail until it narrows and the squad car gets stuck on a low ridge of rock, hemmed in on all sides by trees. Harkness presses the gas but the wheels just spin. He leaves the lights on, grabs his flashlight from the back seat, and abandons the squad car, pushing the driver's side door open as far as he can and slipping out into the woods.

He runs down the trail, pressed into the forest floor by the bare feet of Micmacs and Wampanoags, marched by minutemen and redcoats, and now wandered by dog walkers, lovers, and weed smokers. He takes the path to the left toward what was once the Old Nagog Tavern, now the site of Headless at Freedom Farm, Dex's epic party, already under way.

A
low orange glow filters through the bare trees and whoops and laughter echo from deep in the woods. The path finally opens up on the field behind Dex's house. Harkness walks out across the field, trying to be as invisible as a cop in uniform can be. Ahead, a bonfire sends flames and smoke high into the night sky. A band's playing on the stage and beyond it a white tent glows with strings of orange lights. From across the field, the voices sound like a buzzing human hive.

As he gets closer, Candace runs toward him, bracelets and leather jacket jangling.

“We have to find May.” Candace's face is flushed, eyes bleary from crying. Her voice cracks and she bends over like someone punched her.

“What happened?”

She's shaking and pale, her black hair hanging in dark tendrils. “Dex is all fucked up and he won't tell me where he hid May.”

“Hid her?”

“Didn't want to have a baby at his cool party,” Candace says. “Might make him seem too normal. You have to help me find her, Eddy. You have to find her.”

Harkness holds her by the shoulders and looks into her red-rimmed eyes. “Don't worry,” he says, “I know right where she is.”

H
ARKNESS FEELS ALONG
the wall for a light switch. Candace walks to the center of the dark
barn and pulls a string to turn on a bare bulb high in the rafters. She looks around at the pile of lumber, the tools and trash. “Eddy, she's not here. What're we doing here? Where is she?”

Harkness unlocks the trash barrel and pushes it aside. When he opens the trapdoor, Candace peers down into the gloom.

“What the fuck is that?”

“You don't know?”

“I never come out here. Not since Dex and his stupid friends made it their man cave.”

“It's more than that.” Harkness leads her down the stairs and up into the lab. He turns on the light to reveal the wall of glass tubing gleaming with amber drops.

“What the hell?”

“Drug lab,” Harkness says. “Third Rail.”

“I know they take that shit. But I didn't know they made it.”

Harkness walks past the lab table and toward the desk with the binders. He bends down to look under the desk. He pulls out May's empty car seat.

“Where is she!” Candace runs around the lab, kicking cartons and walls with her heavy boots.

Harkness walks to the other side of the lab, where cardboard boxes are stacked along the dusty floor. He holds up his hand. “Quiet for a minute.”

Candace stops, and they stand still in the bright lab. They hear nothing. Harkness walks to where footsteps mark the dust and kneels down to push aside the boxes. Someone cut a rectangle out of the drywall, poked sloppy air holes in it with a knife, then taped the piece back with duct tape.

“May can't be in there,” Candace says. “Dex wouldn't do that.”

“I'll check it out.” As Harkness peels away the duct tape he's back on Queensbury Street about to reveal Little Dorothy's dissolving body.

“She'd be crying,” Candace shouts. “There's no crying!”

“It'll be okay.” Harkness pulls away the last piece of duct tape and tries to pull out the piece of drywall with his fingernails. It's stuck.

“There's not any crying, Eddy. Don't look. Please. She's not in there. Can't be in there.”

Harkness pries out the drywall with his knife, one corner giving way, then another. His flashlight reveals a dark space about as big as a microwave.

May sits shaking a few feet back on a dirty blanket, her face shining with tears. She's clutching an empty bottle and a filthy stuffed rabbit.

She screams when Harkness's flashlight shines in her eyes.

Candace reaches in. “Come 'ere, May,” she says. “It's okay.” The screaming gets louder. She puts her hands under May's arms and gently slides her out, then holds her tightly to her chest, feels her breathing in gasps.

In a few minutes, Candace pulls down the neck of her T-shirt and offers a breast to May, who takes her nipple with desperate eagerness.

“What kind of father . . . ,” Candace just closes her eyes and shakes her head.

One who knows it may be the only safe place on the farm tonight. But Harkness doesn't say this. “She okay?”

“I think so.”

Harkness reaches into the back of the space where May was hidden. There's stack after stack of hundreds carefully wrapped in plastic. He pulls a few out and shows them to Candace.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Pile of drug money?”

“Dex always told me we didn't have enough money to finish the house,” she says. “That's why we're living like squatters.” Candace moves May to her shoulder and pats her back. She looks around the drug lab. “I can't believe I was such an idiot.”

“Love may make you blind,” Harkness says, “but it doesn't have to make you stupid.”

“Who told you that?”

“A Laotian drug lord.”

“He's right.” Candace lifts May and hands her to Harkness. “Take May for a second?”

“Sure.” Harkness cradles May gently on his shoulder.

Candace kneels down to pull out the stacks of cash. She holds a bundle of cash toward Harkness.

“No,” he says, “all yours.”

Candace throws one stack of money after another toward the delicate wall of glass tubing, knocking pieces from it. Then she picks up a broom and smashes the rest of the tubing, which sprays down on the lab like an ice storm. She smashes a tall glass flask with the broom handle and Third Rail seeps over the table.

May rears back and starts to cry.

“Candace?”

“Cleaning house.” She swings the broom at more of the lab, until nothing's left but glass shards, puddles of drugs, and hissing gas.

“So much for technology.” She tosses the broom on the floor. “Let's get out of here.”

Harkness considers finding the gas and shutting it off, but doesn't bother. He's late for a party.

 

“Walk down that path and you'll hit the main road.” Harkness hands Candace his flashlight. “At the end of all the parked cars, you'll find my friend Officer Watt waiting in a squad car. He'll take you and May to the station or wherever you want to go.”

Candace nods. “What about you?”

“Got to talk to Dex about a few things.”

“Good luck with that.” Candace walks toward the woods, then turns. “Be careful, Eddy. Be really careful. They're all superhigh.”

The wind has picked up, whipping the long brown grass around Harkness in waves as he walks toward the bonfire. The rain is just beginning, the cool air so laden with water that his face is dripping, leather jacket, too. The band is gone now, stage empty, party retreated under the white tent. As Harkness gets closer, he sees someone walking from the party toward him, backlit by the fire.

The wind raises a wall of sparks as he walks closer. The figure throws a handful of shiny disks toward him and the air whistles.

A whirring noise passes above Harkness and leaves a small silver star with five sharp spikes sticking in the arm of his leather jacket, another on his shoulder. Harkness plucks them and tosses them aside.

“Dabilis said you were coming.” Mouse wears a gray hoodie. “Welcome to Headless at Freedom Farm.”

Throwing stars—retro, esoteric, and nasty. Weapon of choice for fake ninjas and anime fans. Of course Mouse would be into them.

“Harkness! Catch.” Another batch of stars whizzes by, and Harkness reaches up instinctively with his fielding hand. Searing pain drops him to his knees on the muddy path. A pale finger lies in the mud in front of him. Blood drips from the red-tipped stump where his index finger used to be.

When Harkness closes his hand, the blood pumping from the crimson stump of his severed finger slows, but only a little. He presses his left hand deep in the pocket of his jacket. He clicks his radio on with his right hand, requests backup and EMTs, tells them he's injured. But no one responds.

Harkness's head lowers toward the ground. The field darkens. His blood-slick hand throbs. His chest burns. Warm blood drains out his sleeve like rainwater. He bends down to take a couple of deep breaths, then stands, swaying in the rain.

Mouse is gone, disappeared into the mist.

Harkness walks toward the party, gritting his teeth against the pain, eyes locked on the bonfire. On a low stage, high schoolers sing “We Are the Champions” and dive into the mud. They don't notice a policeman staggering past, leaving a thin line of blood behind him.

There aren't any ghosts at Headless at Freedom Farm, just idols. The white tent is crowded with Zuckerbergs in gray hoodies, unshaven Franzens in tortoiseshell glasses, and bandana-wrapped David Foster Wallaces carrying well-thumbed copies of
Infinite Jest
. At the back, Thoreau leans on his walking stick, talking to Louisa May Alcott. On the other side of the tent, Harkness sees a couple of raven-haired Sontags, a star-spangled Wonder Woman, a Wurtzel dispensing candy Prozac from a bucket, and a mono-browed Frida Kahlo with a moon-faced Diego Rivera straining on a leash.

Harkness recognizes faces in the costumed crowd. Teachers, entrepreneurs, the intelligentsia of Cambridge, Boston, and further afield, they're all talking, their blurted words and frantic gestures giving away the real reason they're standing under a wedding tent in a rain-soaked field on Halloween night—free drugs.

An emo kid wearing silver boxer shorts and a hat with Mercury wings runs past carrying a trashcan of burning leaves, sparks trailing behind him like a human comet. He throws the can in the dark river and stares at the sizzling, steaming water as if he's accomplished something brave and important.

Dex steps out from beneath the tent. “Hey! Look who's here! Who invited you?” he crows into a bullhorn.

“Party's over.”

Dex laughs. “No way, just getting started.”

“Now, Dex. I'm shutting it down.”

Dex shakes his head, wet strands of yellow hair plastered to his face. He takes a few steps forward. “Get out of here, fake cop,” he says, bullhorn distorting his voice. “Been planning this for months.”

“Small-town drug dealer,” Harkness says. “That how you want your daughter to think of you?”

“Shut up about my daughter,” he says.

“She's not going to be your daughter much longer.”

“What're you talking about?”

“The state doesn't like to see kids stuck in a dark hole in the wall.”

Dex takes this news in.

Three men step out from the tent and stand behind him. They're wearing suits, not costumes. For a moment, Harkness thinks pain is making him hallucinate, but Mach's goons are real. Of course they're here, protecting their boss's interests.

The less addled superheroes drift away from the tent to their cars. The high schoolers jump off the stage and head toward the woods. But the hardcore fans circle around to see what Dex is up to now. They're entrepreneurs, digerati, grad students, winners of prizes and grants. They're airplanes flying far above the mundane world of waitress jobs and parking meters. But on Third Rail, they're just drug hungry and looking for a new thrill
.

Dex throws the bullhorn to the side and holds out his right hand. One of Mach's thugs reaches beneath his jacket and slaps a gun into his palm. Lit by the flickering light of the glowing bonfire, Dex's friends cheer and circle around to watch his latest audacious distraction.

For a moment Harkness thinks he's back on the Brookline Avenue Bridge, surrounded by jeering Sox fans.

“Put that down, Dex,” he says. “Now.” Harkness turns to the side and radios for backup. No one answers.

Harkness wipes his eyes with the back of his blood-washed wrist and stares through the rain at Dex walking toward him, white shirt plastered to his skin, rain-tangled yellow hair dangling in his face, gun in hand. He's smiling off in the distance, Third Rail already rewriting this scene to transform him into a superhero.

Harkness clenches his ruined left hand and shoves it deep in the pocket of his leather jacket. He's lightheaded and his legs shake like he's been running for hours.

“Put the gun down now,” Harkness says, “and this is all over.”

Dex walks closer. He's armed and dangerous. And he's not obeying clear instructions shouted by an officer. Deadly force is allowable.

Harkness draws his Glock and feels its familiar weight in his hand. “Stop,” he shouts.

“What are you going to do, shoot me with your plastic gun, fake cop?”

“Last warning.” Harkness raises his Glock, clicks off the safety, and aims.

“Fuck you.” Dex lifts his gun.

Harkness fires, and the explosion echoes across the yard. A red rip opens in the thigh of Dex's jeans and he drops to the ground. He kneels and stares at the wound as if he can think it away.

Called in by Watt, State Police helicopters spin on the horizon.

“Stay. Right. There.” Harkness wants the incident to end now with the State Police hauling Dex in. But Dex struggles to rise from the mud, turned tenacious by Third Rail.

Dex walks toward him, teeth clenched, leg dragging.