Unhinged (7 page)

And then I’d forgotten all about it. “But I don’t—”

“You will, in a minute.” Harry’s eyes said I wouldn’t be happy with it, either. But by now of course I had to hear the rest.

“I also didn’t catch
that
guy,” he said grimly. “Instead, he caught me. Here.” He pulled a folded newspaper clipping from the breast pocket of his worn leather jacket. “This sums it up.”

The date inked on the clipping said it was three years old but the events popped out of it as if they were only yesterday, the kind of occurrences you imagine only happen in nightmares.

Or you hope so. “Jesus,” I said when I finished. There was a lot more detail in the clip than the
News
had picked up from the wire stories.

“This guy found out you were after him? He killed your wife
and
your . . .”

He winced. “Yeah. I had a girlfriend. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it was.”

“And he found out about them, somehow, and he killed her. I mean, killed them both.”

“Right. But there’s more. Final act: the guy suckers me to a rooftop by the river. He’s got a woman up there, he’s holding her hostage at knifepoint. The woman is a hooker, addict, well-known skell. In other words, she’s trash.”

My turn to wince. “I mean,” he said, “from the way they spun it, the tabloids. Not from my point of view. Never from mine.”

He took a deep breath. “So anyway, he’s got a mask on, so I can’t identify him, and he’s got the woman at the edge. Ten-story building. And he’s dancing around up there, daring me to take my shot.”

“And?” Had the
News
named the cop involved in what it had called a hostage situation gone wrong? I couldn’t remember.

He continued steadily. “This is a guy who has killed people I love, people my friends love. I don’t know why I didn’t charge him, take the three of us off the goddamned roof.”

“But you didn’t. And you didn’t shoot.”

He dropped his gaze. “No. He kept holding her so I’d have to shoot her, to get at him. I’d put in a call for backup and I was waiting. But before they were even in position, he spotted them. It was like
he
was waiting for
them
.”

The fluorescent lights set into the ceiling tiles made an insectile hum, flickering just at the edge of my awareness like the light in a bad dream. “Waiting for . . . ?”

“Witnesses,” Harry said flatly. “Cop witnesses, who’d know how badly I had screwed up, going up there alone. And the reporters who’d heard the radio traffic on the call, so everyone else was going to find out about it, too. Once he had them arranged . . .”

I caught on. “He was taunting you. You could’ve shot him but he was betting you wouldn’t shoot an innocent woman. Innocent at the time. Beside him, she must’ve looked like an angel.”

Harry Markle’s eyes gazed into the middle distance. “Yeah. Like an angel. But when he pushed her, she couldn’t fly.”

He looked at me. “Didn’t,” he said, “fly.” Suddenly my son in his hospital bed seemed safe as houses.

“He scrambled down a roof door,” Harry recited, “locked it inside, got clean away. And that was the end of my cop career.”

Wade came to the door with a copy of
Working Waterfront
in one hand. The big front-page story was about an old lobster boat fitted out like an emergency room, to bring health care to island towns even more remote than Eastport.

Wade made an A-OK sign with his thumb and fingers, waited as Harry went on: “I got put on desk duty, finally sent to a shrink, which by that point I needed. I kept seeing the woman’s face.”

“I can imagine,” I sympathized, then wished I hadn’t.

Because I couldn’t imagine. Not really.

“But it was also all
they
needed, the bosses, to get rid of an embarrassment. Me.”

He looked up. “I traveled. Now I’m here. Decent retirement package, I had my years in. They did what they had to do, get me to go without a big fight. So I buy an old house, get a dog, live a life. Such as it is.”

None of that had been in the papers, of course. “Harry, that is terrible. I’m so sorry. But—”

A grin twitched his lips: not a nice grin.

Not at all. “But you still want to know what all that’s got to do with you, Jacobia? Or with Sam? Think about it.”

So I did, and what I came up with made my stomach do a queasy roll. “Harry, you’re not telling me you believe—”

“Not
believe,
” he interrupted harshly. “I
know
.”

Wade came to the table, his grey eyes narrowed protectively. “Harry, are you saying someone did this deliberately to Sam?”

“It had to be an accident,” I insisted. “That old car . . .”

But Wade was frowning. “George towed it over to the garage. Sam was awake when he got here, he said the brakes just went out.”

“I heard him say that, too,” Harry put in. “That’s why . . .”

I shook my head dumbly. “The brakes? You mean completely?”

Wade nodded, his face grim. Another thought struck me as my mind danced away from the notion of someone trying to hurt Sam.

“Harry. You said you’d met me
again
. After I’d gone to live with my aunt and uncle.”

He smiled almost pityingly. “The first time? I don’t think you’d remember that. The blast blew you out of the house into the yard. A piece of sheet metal landed on top of you. Other wreckage, like bricks and so on, piled on that.”

Dimly, I did remember: not the details, specifically, but a tremendous sound, the smell of the smoke, a soaring sensation and screaming that I later understood must have been sirens.

And me. “A man came,” I recalled slowly. “Dressed in blue. He looked into my eyes. He said everything would be all right.”

It wasn’t, but never mind. “A young cop. He pulled me out.” I looked at Harry. “Was it you?” I whispered. “You saved me?”

Harry nodded slowly, his eyes glistening. He swallowed hard, his throat working before he could speak.

“That was me. And it’s great to see you doing so well, Jake. But I’ve brought something.
Someone
. I didn’t know . . .”

His voice broke wretchedly. “I’m sorry, Jacobia. So sorry.”

A tear slid down his cheek.

The next day
when my panic over Sam had faded I could sort my thoughts better, but the result didn’t feel like improvement. Harriet Hollingsworth had been murdered; I remained quite sure of that.

But now there was a new wrinkle. The guy living in her house was a blast from my past, and he believed Sam’s accident wasn’t one. That instead it had something to do with
him
.

“Well,” Ellie said, frowning, “what he told you checks out.”

We’d let the answering machine take phone calls, getting the incoming numbers from the caller ID box and noting them down for later callbacks. Everyone we knew wanted to be told Sam was all right and reporters from the
Tides
and the
Examiner
had called, too. But I hadn’t felt like talking to anyone.

Instead via the Internet on Sam’s computer we had confirmed most of the details of Harry’s tale, the ones that were publicly available, anyway. Newspaper archives of
The New York Times
gave the NYPD’s version of the story Harry had told me the night before.

Chillingly, the on-line articles delivered no photos of any police officers. They’d appeared in the print editions, a sidebar noted, but were later judged inappropriate for electronic versions in case a cop’s face caused him or her to be targeted by what one quoted officer termed colorfully, “a fruitcake from afar.”

The phrase was funny but the message behind it wasn’t: that someone had spooked even the cops of the NYPD. Ordinarily the devil himself couldn’t scare one of them, I mused as I marched downtown with Monday frisking along beside me.

I strode past the Top Cat truck, parked in front of the Peavey Library. Two production workers were eyeing the massive old Revolutionary War cannon on the lawn as if wondering how to fire it. I could have told them they’d have to get the log out of its throat, first. During the War of 1812 the cannon must have looked sufficient to the soldiers at Fort Sullivan on the hill over the harbor. That is, until they spotted the British flotilla sailing up the bay and knew they were outnumbered hundreds to one.

Which went to prove something, I supposed, but I didn’t know what and at the moment, I didn’t care. Twenty-four hours earlier my only worry had been fixing a gutter.

Now I had an injured son who might not have gotten that way by accident, a missing woman who surely hadn’t, and a new chapter in my own thoroughly lousy history, starring a father who instead of dying in a bomb blast might instead have callously abandoned me.

On Water Street the shops gleamed with freshly washed plate glass, new paint, and tubs of red geraniums; sidewalks bustled as the shops’ proprietors readied for the coming tourist season. I passed the Quoddy Crafts store, its front window filled with the gorgeous stuff people around here kept busy making all winter: finely worked earrings of silver-wrapped beach glass, sweetgrass wreaths intricately braided with colored silks, white ash walking sticks incised with Native American glyphs, stained glass panels glowing with jewel colors.

And much more, but I didn’t stop to admire it. Down on the dock, past the massive grey granite building that housed the Customs office and the Coast Guard, a wooden hut called Rosie’s sold hot dogs and onion rings. Near Rosie’s stood the pay phone from which a dock worker had called 911 after Sam’s crash. I ignored that, too, as I entered the wooden storefront that housed the Eastport Police Department.

“Thanks,” I told Eastport’s police chief, Bob Arnold, as Monday flopped down on the floor by Bob’s grey metal desk. I’d called him hours before, and he’d agreed to make some inquiries for me.

“Early retirement,” Bob confirmed now. On his desk lay fresh copies of the Ellsworth
Union-Leader,
the Portland
Gazette,
and the
Examiner,
plus several more I wasn’t familiar with.

You never saw him reading one, but by the end of the day Bob would have absorbed the contents of them all. According to Bob, there was nothing a crook liked better than a cop who hadn’t yet cottoned on to the capers the crook had been pulling elsewhere.

“Under a cloud, like he said,” Bob went on, meaning Harry. “Union got him his pension, hadda fight for that. And they never caught the creep he’d been after, either. Once Harry Markle was out of the picture, this bad guy he’d been chasing stopped doing bad deeds like someone shut off a switch.”

Bob was pink-cheeked and balding, with big blue eyes that looked innocent until you peered more deeply into them. “Like maybe it was what the guy’d had in mind in the first place, hurting Markle,” Bob observed thoughtfully.

“An old enemy of Harry’s?” That hadn’t occurred to me. “But all those deaths, isn’t that an awful lot of . . .” I faltered.

“Overkill,” Bob agreed dourly, gazing out the window. “That’s why I don’t buy the idea, myself.”

Ellie and I could research a lot, but some questions you had to be a cop yourself to ask effectively. And I wanted them asked, never mind if some of the answers knocked me for a loop. I didn’t enjoy being blindsided by the past.

Or anything else. “But it’s not just Harry’s facts that are accurate?” I pressed Bob. “His spin on it is true? Someone in the city really was victimizing cops, by killing their loved ones?”

Out on the water a little black-and-red scallop dragger was puttering into the harbor. But most of the town’s boats were in the boat basin getting extra bumpers thrown on for what locals predicted would be a gullywhumper.

“Yeah. Nobody in the series not connected to the job.”

The string of deaths Harry had been investigating had begun about five years earlier. They were bad ones, the killings ritualistic. The papers hadn’t printed the gory details but you didn’t have to work too hard to imagine them. “A real mess,” Bob added unnecessarily.

To distract myself from the mental images I fixed my eyes on the horizon. The storm was in the mid-Atlantic states now, raising hell all over the place; state of emergency on the Jersey shoreline.

“Thing like that, you ask yourself,” Bob said, “what’s the point? But in this case, you look at the big picture, seems like knocking off a whole lot of people
was
the point.”

I turned back to him. “What do you mean?”

He shook his head sorrowfully. “The cop connection made it special, and maybe there was some grudge-type reason somewhere in the past. Somebody targets cops, it’s ’cause they don’t like cops. But when people
keep
killing people, bottom line it’s usually ’cause they like killing.”

Brr
. He peered at me. “Looks like someone had a poke at you, too, Jake. Or are you working on your house again?”

“House,” I confirmed tersely. No need to add to my already stellar reputation by detailing exactly what had happened.

Bob got up, gazing across the street at the concrete barrier that I gathered Sam had crashed into; the night before, it was on Bob’s orders that I’d been kept from the scene until Sam was revived. The barrier bore dark blue car paint and white scars from the impact, its orange reflectors smashed, shining bits of them littering the street.

“Kid’s lucky,” Bob commented, hitching up his belt which was burdened with baton, sidearm, and cuffs. Bob was the kind of guy who expected the best but always prepared for the worst. “He’s going to be okay? And Maggie?”

“Uh-huh.” Just thinking about it again made my heart do a buck-and-wing. “We went back to the hospital before breakfast. Sam said all he thought of when the brakes went was making it around the corner.”

Or they’d have ended up in the water. The howling I’d heard was Sam desperately trying to slow the car with the transmission. But the Key Street hill was too steep for engine braking, and the attempt had failed.

“They’re agitating to get out today,” I said. “Sam might but Maggie probably not. She took a harder hit.”

He’d been chipper, no more cardiac monitor, requiring only codeine to be comfortable. Maggie looked pale and in pain despite stronger pills, but she’d had her game face on, working to get up and into a wheelchair and already suggesting word games she and Sam could play while they remained in the hospital.