Third Rail (6 page)

Harkness shrugs. “Wouldn't know. Never met him. Dad kept his business friends separate.”

“From?”

“Our family.” His throat tightens.

“Was he involved in anything . . .”

“Illegal? Like my father?”

“That's not what I'm saying, Harkness.
Christ
. I'm just trying to figure out why a middle-aged guy with a clean record would go off the rails like this. Anyone we could talk to?”

Harkness runs through his Nagog connections. “I went to high school with his daughter, Candace,” he says. “She's a couple of years younger than me. Completely wild.”

“Did you know this wild daughter back in the day?”

Harkness shakes his head. “Not very well. Haven't seen her in years.”

“Get reacquainted. Do some legwork.”

“Me, sir? I have meters to empty.”

“Don't be clever. You think I should send Detective Ramble? He'll just talk the guy to death,” the captain says quietly. “Or worse Dabilis? They don't know this town the way you do. Being a local is a big advantage for cases like this. You're not a stranger. You know everyone. And they know you, trust you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Start at Nagog Regional, in the ICU,” the captain says. “This Hammond fellow is probably going to die there in a couple of hours. EMTs say he doesn't have a chance.”

“No disrespect intended, sir,” Harkness says. “But why do we care?”

“If it's an accident, the town ends up paying the whole bill for repairing this historic site.” The captain points at the smashed monument. “Which will be expensive. But if it's suicide, it's willful destruction of property and Mr. Hammond's insurance has to pay.”

The tow truck pulls the Volvo free from the monument and what's left of the Union soldier rolls off its roof.

“Hey, be careful!” the captain shouts at the wrecker, which runs over the soldier's arm.

“Hammond got drunk, smashed his car into a monument at about sixty miles an hour, and put a gun to his head. You need more proof than that, sir?”

“Lawyers and insurance companies run the show now,” the captain says. “Got to get something in writing. That's what the town manager wants.”

“So you want me to go talk to a dying guy and get him to confess to wrecking the town monument while trying to kill himself? Sir?”

“Yes, ideally as soon as possible. Before he dies.”

Harkness says nothing.

“Would you rather be emptying meters?”

 

Harkness walks back to retrieve the coin transfer unit. A crowd gathers on Main Street, cars pulled off to both sides of the road. As he walks closer, a clutch of concerned women rushes toward him.

“You have to do something,” one of them says.

“What's the problem, ma'am?”

“A deer.”

Harkness walks closer. After Hammond did his damage, the injured deer limped into the woods to die. But a big buck has managed to drag itself back onto the road. A group of citizens huddles around the buck, as if it's a dolphin beached on the Cape. Dozens of cars are lined up down Main Street. Harkness radios in and requests Animal Control.

The buck's back legs splay at terrible angles behind him. Harkness can't count how many points the buck has; his antlers are broken and scattered in pieces on the road. Glistening pink gel seeps from the nubs.

The buck rises up suddenly, desperate eyes glinting, and tries to walk, front hooves clicking on the road as he pulls his scraped body and useless legs a few inches closer to the edge of the road.

“We have to help him,” someone says. The small crowd shares the solemn but confused look of do-gooders not sure how to do good.

“Look, the animal control officer is on his way,” Harkness says. The protocol is to wait. But no one should have to watch an animal suffer. Best to clear people away. “Step back. Get back in your cars, please.”

The door of a Toyota pickup opens and the driver strides toward Harkness. Leather tool belt, big boots, greasy Carhartt jacket—he looks like a carpenter from the Cape.

“Just shoot that buck,” he says, voice loud and flat. “Gonna die in the woods anyway.”

“The animal control officer is on his way,” Harkness says. “Please step back into your truck, sir.”

“It's in pain. Why make it last longer?” The carpenter points at Harkness's plastic gun. “Just shoot it.”

If he had a real gun, Harkness would have by now. But firing colorful disks over the dying deer doesn't seem helpful. He scopes the carpenter out. He seems like an ordinary guy, the kind who obeys cops. “We're waiting, understand, sir?”

“Look, dude. I'm a hunter. If I had my gear in the truck I'd just shoot it for you.”

The crowd murmurs. They want to be humane, but they're not sure about just shooting the deer, which would involve death
.
As a rule, the town of Nagog is opposed to death. A few weeks ago someone asked Harkness to rescue a spider trapped inside a parking meter
.

The buck rises up on his front legs and gives out a terrified bleat. He collapses on the road with a thud, black tongue lolling, flanks heaving.

“For Christ's sake, shoot him!” The carpenter stomps back to his truck.

“The rest of you, get in your cars, please,” Harkness says. They start to shuffle to their Subarus and Hondas. Then the carpenter comes back carrying a sledgehammer.

“You. Stop.” Because Harkness looks and sounds like a cop, the carpenter does.

Harkness points at the crowd. “All of you. In your cars, now.” They trudge away.

A car drives up behind him and Harkness turns to see the brown sedan with the green
TOWN OF NAGOG
seal on the side. Hank Steadman, the town's gruff, incompetent animal control officer, walks toward Harkness, holding a tranquilizer gun sloppily at his side.

Behind him, Harkness hears a fleshy smash and then another. When he turns, the carpenter is swinging his hammer at the buck's head like it's a reluctant two-by-four. There's a crack when he hits the buck's skull and the deer shudders once, legs trying to run one last time. Then the buck goes still.

“There's your fucking
animal control
.” He wipes the sledge on the grass and stalks back toward his truck, shaking his head.

Hank ambles closer. “Looks like you got a dead deer here, Eddy.”

Harkness nods. The buck's black eyes are open and staring, his crushed skull oozing dark blood.

“Grab a leg and we'll get him off the road.”

H
ARKNESS PULLS INTO
THE EMPTY PARKING LOT
of Nagog Regional Hospital. There's a banner announcing a blood drive, an empty guard shack, and a couple of old men in tan raincoats shuffling outside the Pavilion, the town's elder care facility. Harkness calls the familiar number.

“Sir!”

“Patrick, it's me.”

“Thanks for that information, sir!”

“Someone's in your office, right?” Harkness isn't supposed to call Narco-Intel.

“That's correct.”

“Call back when you can.”

Harkness clicks his phone off and sits in the quiet squad car for a moment. Through the rain-speckled windshield, he can see the semicircle drive that leads to the emergency room—a longtime Harkness family haunt. He remembers going there at seven when his brother George pushed him out of a tree. When they were twelve, they walked deep into the Nagog Woods and shot each other at fifty yards to see if the pellets would break skin. They did. At sixteen, he and George both ended up in the ER when they smashed their father's BMW into a cement wall to see if the airbags would inflate. They didn't. In high school, George taught his punk brother how to make a pipe bomb in the basement. They learned to make do without eyebrows.

Their father, Edward “Red” Harkness, took a perverse pride in his rough sons, their fights, and the trips to the emergency room. Red had a few visits of his own, stabbing himself in the thigh while drinking Scotch and opening Wellfleet oysters with a barlow knife, an anxiety attack triggered by a market drop, and a holiday overdose of Demerol that left him sprawled on the living room floor, pale and unresponsive as a birch log.

It's only funny when someone gets hurt.
Like many a truth, the Harkness family motto makes more sense in retrospect. Eddy and George, with encouragement from their father, fought until blood flowed from somewhere—nose, mouth, scalp. They carried violence inside them like a banked fire. They still do.

His phone rings.

“Harky?”

“Yeah?”

“Got some news for you.”

“Good or bad?”

Patrick says nothing.

“Out with it.”

“Well, that check I ran on Thalia Havoc came up completely clean. But when I ran Thalia Prochazka, I found out your girl's been busy.”

“Like what?”

“Drug busts. Junk twice. Blow once. All under a gram. Assault with a deadly weapon.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“Dinner plate. Threw it at someone at some Chinatown dump. And breaking and entering. Broke into the Public Garden at night and took a Swan Boat for a spin back when she was in art school.”

Harkness has to smile at that one.

“Girl's a pistol.”

“Roger that,” Harkness says. “What about the call from Pauley Fitz?”

“Someone's got his cell phone.”

“That's weird. Didn't it get smashed?”

“He dropped it on the bridge. Ended up in Evidence downtown.”

“So a cop took it?”

“Maybe, Harky. All I know is Pauley Fitz's phone is missing and no one signed it out.”

“Weird.” Harkness sits in the quiet car for a moment, staring at the gray cement hospital.

“Looks like someone's got it in for you, Harky. All we got to do is figure out who.”

“That's always the hard part,” Harkness says.

“I'll help you.”

“I know that,” Harkness says. “Got to go.”

“Meters?”

“No. Heading to the hospital to bother a drunk driver who's about to die.”

“You get to have all the fun,” Patrick says. “Listen, I got some other bad news.”

“How bad?”

“Real bad. Watch-your-back bad. Leave-town-at-high-speed bad.”

“What're you talking about?”

“Can't tell you now, Eddy. Didn't exactly find out via normal channels. Come downtown and we'll talk.”

 

The mound is covered by sheets and blankets, woven with tubes and wires, and surrounded by pulsing monitors no one seems to notice. Harkness can't imagine that it's human or alive. From the door of the blazingly bright ICU, he watches the doctors and nurses connecting tubes and setting up equipment. Their hushed, urgent voices make it obvious that Robert Hammond isn't going to be walking out of Nagog Regional any time soon.

“Can I help you?” A young male nurse with his dark hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail turns toward Harkness.

Harkness takes off his hat and gives the nurse his cop look—serious, concerned, and honest. “I'm here to ask Mr. Hammond a few questions.”

“I don't think he's got much to say. We're pumping him full of drugs.” The nurse squints at Harkness's badge. “Eddy, right? Eddy Harkness. Nagog High?”

“Right.”

“It's me, Andy Singh.” The nurse points at his narrow chest beneath baby-blue scrubs.

Harkness digs back through his high school memories. “Right. Hi, Andy.” While Harkness was at the Academy, on street patrols in Boston, and with Narco-Intel, his high school classmates turned into townies.

They shake hands and the nurse leads Harkness a couple of yards away from Hammond.

“You were on the baseball team,” Andy Singh says. “And you were into music, right? I was in a band. The Andy Singh Experience?”

Harkness remembers a band of shoegazers in the sun at Nagog High's spring music fest. “Guitar, right? Still playing?”

Andy shakes his head. “No. Too busy. Besides, I got way into drugs in college. Had to give up on music. Found a program. Stuck with it. Cleaned up.”

“Good. Good for you.” Harkness gives him the hard look and Andy's eyes drift. When people say they've straightened out, they probably haven't. Odds are Andy has some weed or a pill hoard tucked away in his locker.

“Now I'm working at a hospital. Surrounded by all kinds of drugs. Weird, huh? How things change.”

“Weirder if they didn't.” Harkness looks back at the mound. “Is this guy going to make it?”

“Probably not,” Andy says. “But you never know.”

“Injuries?”

“Broken arm, cracked pelvis, punctured lung, lots of internal stuff, toxemia.” Andy holds out his hands about a foot apart. “Going to have to take out a big chunk of his liver. Luckily his is the size of
Tay-hass
. Some cranial trauma. Brain's loose.”

“Sounds bad.”

“Ought to be dead already. Scrawny little dudes speeding on prom night? They die in wrecks like this. Puffy guys, wedged in their Volvos, it's like they're driving around with extra airbags made out of fat.”

“He was drunk at the time of the accident, yes?”

Andy leans forward. “Officially, I'm not supposed to say anything.” He flips back a few pages on his clipboard. “But, yeah, when he was admitted his blood alcohol was .23, like three times over the limit. That probably helped him, too.”

“How's that?”

“He didn't clench up on impact. He was all loosey-goosey.”

“So being totally drunk and morbidly obese helped save his life,” Harkness says.

“Worked out that way for him, I guess.”

“Any indication that he was trying to kill himself?”

Andy tilts his head.

“Just trying to assess his . . . state of mind.”

“Let me take a look.” Andy glances back toward the doctors, then goes through the chart and reads. “Patient was confused, difficult to control, convinced that he had been in a plane crash.”