Third Rail (3 page)

“What're you talking about?”

“No, really. Get the fuck out of here.”

Harkness shakes his head.

“You really don't know, do you?” The manager's goatee rises and falls.

“No.” Harkness almost remembers being here.

“Okay, then. Got something to show you.”

“Gotta go to work.”

“You,
amigo,
owe me a minute or two.” He leads Harkness into the office, and a sullen clerk shuffles from the lottery machine to the counter to take his place.

“Let's roll the tape, okay?” The manager reaches over and presses the buttons beneath a closed-circuit TV. The clerk flails his arms and customers flee backwards through the front door. When the time code hits 2
A.M.
Harkness sees a cop barging from cooler to counter.

The manager hits a button and the action slows to show the cop lurching through the store, pawing through bags of chips and knocking candy on the floor. Harkness is reassured and sickened to spot his Glock 17 dangling in his right hand.

“Mind telling me what the fuck you were thinking?”

“Long night.” No amount of whiskey and beer could turn him into the monster he sees on the screen.

“Even longer for my shit-shift guy. He called and woke me up, asking if he should call the cops or not. I said
no,
'cuz the cops were already here.”

“Thanks for that.” Harkness looks away and his eyes fall on the smudgy photo of the store manager's smiling wife and chubby kids thumbtacked over the monitor. Looks like Dad's been bringing snacks home . . .

“Hey!”

“What?”
Focus, Eddy.

“I was saying that we're glad to see a cop around here. Almost never happens. Even if you were drunk and scaring my customers.”

“Look, I'm really sorry,” Harkness says. And he is. Sorry he's hit a new low. Sorry to see his gun on the screen but gone from its holster now.

The manager gives Harkness a cold stare for a moment, then rolls his eyes. “No real harm done,” he says. “Just don't do it again.”

“I won't,” Harkness says.

“If you show up here again all wrecked, I'll go viral with the tape,
amigo
. You'll be all over the Internet.”

Too late for that,
Harkness thinks. “Got it.” He rushes toward the door.

“Hey!”

Harkness stops.

“Be careful out there.” The manager laughs until he starts to wheeze.

 

Harkness figures he probably wandered on the way back, so he takes the side streets to Thalia's loft. He's still cringing, replaying the video in his mind, watching the out-of-control zombie cop whirling around the store. Harkness knows rock bottom when he sees it.

Painful as it was to watch, the tape proves that Harkness didn't lose his gun at the Zero Room or the art party. It has to be between the gas station and Thalia's. Or someone else found it already, a possibility that Harkness can't even think about.

Harkness checks his watch. He has to be at the station in half an hour, about as long as it'll take to drive west to Nagog at eighty miles an hour.

Walking down Atkinson Street, trying to scan every inch of the shattered sidewalk and keep the panic down, he almost runs into a kid in a puffy orange parka that encases him like a rind.

“What you looking for, Jim-Jim?”

“My gun,” he says.

“Your gun? I can get you a gun.”

The guy's all Fubu and Kangol, white unlaced Pumas, emergency-colored parka, and gold-mirror shades. Looks like a street player circa years ago. He's probably on his way to Boston Latin.

“What kind of gun?”

“Nine millimeter. Flexi-action automatic. Like a machine gun. Like a fuckin' mortar, man,” Fubu says, fake grilles glinting. “I can get you fuckin'
ordnance
. Stuff left over from Afghanistan. Meet and exceed your expectations. Pop a head off in a jiffy.”

“I don't want just any gun,” Harkness says. “Has to be my gun. Glock 17, custom issue. Got a scrape on the grip. Lost it somewhere around here. If you find it, I'll pay big.” Sweat drips down his sides. Harkness peels back his coat and shows his badge and empty holster. “I need the gun that goes with this.”

“Shit, man,” Fubu says. “Should of told me you was a cop.”

“Thought my uniform might have clued you in.”

“That uniform looks fake. Where you a cop at, anyhow?”

“Nagog.”

Fubu squints. “Fancy town. Out west, right? Picket fences. White folks.”

“That's pretty much it. They need cops, too.”

“For what?”

Harkness shrugs. “When they lock their keys in the Subaru?”

“Figured you was an actor or something. They always filming some dumb-ass cop movie on account of it still looks like dirty old Boston around here. I keep my eye out for your gun, though. Things you start looking for have a way of showing up, 'ventually.”

“If you find it, I'll pay you a thousand, cash.” Harkness's misfiring brain spits out the offer before he has time to think about where he's going to get that kind of money.

“How about two?”

“Sure.” Harkness bends down and puts his hands on his knees, breathes deep, and wonders how he ended up haggling to buy back his own gun.

Fubu perks up. “I'll do some looking around and get back to you.”

“Wait. Name's Eddy. How'll you know where to find me?”

“You're cribbing with that lady with the red hair. One that lives over there, right?” He points toward Thalia's loft.

“How'd you know that?”

Fubu shrugs. “You'll be back, Eddy, my man. 'Cuz she is
so fine
.” He shuts his eyes and downloads his own private porno, starring Thalia.

As Harkness walks to his patrol car, he knows this kid is never going to come up with his gun. It's not lost on the ragged edge of the South End.

It's not lost at all.

S
IREN SCREAMING
,
HARKNESS
speeds west down Route 2, parting the cars on the crowded highway and racing past them. “Young, Fast, Iranians” blares from the shitty speakers. The dashboard clock moves closer to seven. The road rises slowly and crosses flatland marshes and low hills, maples flaming and fields blanched by an early frost.

Harkness learned to drive here, going to Cambridge for hardcore shows at the Middle East or to hang out next to the Harvard Square T stop. Although he did stupid things when he was younger, Harkness never would have lost a gun.

He turns down the F.U.'s in midscream and dials Narco-Intel, its number as familiar as his own.

“Harky-Hark. Up with the sun, are you?” Patrick's familiar voice cheers him for a moment.

“Driving to work,” Harkness says. “I need you to check something for me.”

“You ask, we do it. You know how we are here, Harky. Like your loving family of misfit toys.”

Harkness smiles.

“What do you need?”

Harkness thinks about telling Patrick about his lost gun but stops himself. “Guy called me late last night pretending to be Pauley Fitz.”

“Sick fuck.”

“Can you look up a cell phone number and see if it's his?” Harkness checks his phone and reads the number.

“That dude's dead, Harky. Footnote to history. Stain on the Pike.”

“The guy who called me wasn't dead.”

“Yet.”

“Right. So can you check it out?”

“Not a problem, boss.” Patrick pauses. “When you coming back?”

“Future cloudy. Check back later,” Harkness says.

“Don't go all Magic 8 Ball on me.”

“Wisdom comes from unusual sources.”

“No doubt about that Harky. No doubt.”

 

Harkness drives past the exits for Concord and spins through a traffic rotary next to a state prison topped with concertina wire shimmering in the morning sun. He found an inmate's stash of PCP in a drainpipe there once, dangling from a thread of bright white dental floss. Like many hides—great concept, lazy execution.

In a few minutes, the white church spires rise above the thick pine forest. Tumbled walls of gray stones border ancient fields dotted with rusting tractors and sagging barns. Harkness is home now, crossing the town line into Nagog, a colonial town ten miles square, home to ten thousand no-nonsense New Englanders. Cities churn, suburbs strive, but small towns stay the same. Harkness knows almost everyone who lives in Nagog. And everyone knows him.

After the incident, the BPD internal review put Harkness on unpaid administrative leave for a year, a polite way to get him out of the way. Taking a patrolman gig in his quiet hometown seemed like a penance at first. But when Boston scorned him, when his name became a punch line in the comedy clubs, when Sox fans held up signs with his face on it in the Fenway Park bleachers, when
Boston Herald
editorials railed against him—Harkness was relieved to be back home, serving out his time in the minor league of law enforcement.

Like any small town, Nagog can be annoying. Young moms in Lululemon yoga pants clog the booths at the Nagog Bakery. Elders in Outbacks drift from lane to lane, lost in memories or transfixed by foliage. Guys smelling like vodka and toothpaste hog the public computers at the library while they check their stock portfolios. Rich kids in expensive leather jackets skulk around the parking lot of the E-Z Mart. But his hometown has an old-fashioned reserve and politeness that Harkness admires, craves even.

Nagog isn't very exciting, but it's predictable. And sometimes that's enough.

***

The Nagog Five and Ten isn't open yet but Harkness knocks when he sees Lee walking around inside.

Lee peers through his thick glasses and comes to the door, twisting the deadbolt open. “Eddy.”

“Lee.”

Short and owlish, wearing an AC/DC T-shirt and baggy jeans, Lee looks pretty much the same as he did every day in high school. “Need something?”

Harkness pauses for a second and thinks about whether he should tell Lee. They've known each other since grade school. And he really doesn't have a choice. “Yeah,” Harkness says. “I need a gun.”

“Don't they give you one of those when you're a cop? Even here?”

“They do. But it looks like I . . . left mine somewhere.” Harkness lifts his leather jacket and points to the empty holster. “Need something to fill in for it.”

“A stunt gun.”

“Right, a stunt gun.”

“You've come to the right place.”

They walk inside. The dark store smells like a laboratory storeroom, safe and scientific.

Lee points. “Over in aisle two.”

Three aisles stretch from front to back of the store, lined with office supplies, toys, and cheap candy—all organized by Lee and his acolytes of old-school retail. They come to a pegboard of toy guns—silver cap pistols, ray guns, potato guns, and dozens more. Harkness tries to concentrate but his eyes unfocus. Lee's dark store is cluttered and overwhelming. And last night still hovers like an inexplicable storm cloud.

Lee picks up a brown, furry gun with a smiling monkey face at the end of the barrel. “Want a monkey gun? We've sold lots of them.” When he squeezes the trigger a scream echoes through the store.

“I think I need something less furry.”

“We had to take the real-looking ones off the shelves a couple of years back,” Lee says. “People were using them to rob banks and what have you.”

Harkness glances at the clock over the door. There's less than five minutes to get to the station or face the wrath of the Sweathog.

“Let me check out back.” Lee runs to the storage room and comes back carrying a gray plastic handgun with a brown grip. Harkness unsnaps his holster and Lee drops in the toy gun. “Perfect fit.”

“Handle's kind of shiny. People might be able to tell.”

Lee holds a finger in the air then rushes across the store. He comes back with a piece of sandpaper from the hardware aisle and dulls the grip with an expert rub.

“Thanks, looks great,” Harkness says. “You're a genius.”

“And look where it got me?” Lee points around the store. “Selling candy and trash bags.”

Harkness reaches for his wallet but Lee waves him away.

“But here . . . you'll need these.” Lee dumps a handful of bright plastic disks into his hand. “It shoots them. Let me know if you need more.”

Harkness smiles. “I will.”

“And Eddy?”

They stop at the front door.

“I think you might need this, too.” Lee throws him a roll of mints from the counter. “You smell like a bar.”

S
ERGEANT DABILIS'S RED SOX
cap is
jammed on his head above a shiny forehead so moist it could seal an envelope. The Sweathog's shirt-drenching sweats are legendary. Harkness signs in and maneuvers through the Pit, crowded during the shift change. He edges toward the squad room for a coffee.

“Do you people know what happened last night?” Sergeant Dabilis gives a wan, sick smile.

No one says anything. Harkness freezes.

Sergeant Dabilis shakes his head. “They clinched it—worst season in American League history. Ever.” Sergeant Dabilis turns cardiac red at the thought. “You jinxed us,” he hisses at Harkness, then points to his hat. “
The Curse Is Worse.
Heard that one?”

Harkness has heard it a lot. It's the rallying cry of every Yankees fan.

“Well, now that the season is over, it's time for the whole Red Sox Nation to take a steaming dump right on your pointy head. Not millions of little dumps. One really big dump.”

“Could you shut up?” From her desk, Debbie the dispatcher gives Sergeant Dabilis the finger without looking up. Ramble, Nagog's excuse for a detective, looks up from a personal phone call. Watt, Fredette, Sorger, and the other cops say nothing. Like kids in a dysfunctional family, the Nagog cops have learned to keep their heads low.