Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

The Way They Do It in Boston by Linda Barnes

Unlike most of the other authors featured in this issue, Linda Barnes has never before appeared in EQMM. She will, nevertheless, probably be well known to our readers. She is the bestselling author of seventeen novels, twelve in the Carlotta Carlyle mystery series and four in the Michael Spraggue series. Her work has won the Anthony and American Mystery awards and received numerous nominations for the Edgar and Shamus awards.

Drew gives a single yank on the whip-thin leash. Gid strains against the collar and makes a noise deep in his throat.

“Nice dog,” Jay Harley says. “Gideon, right?”

Gid, a brown, black, and white shepherd mix, is compact and powerful, with one torn ear and fierce, mismatched eyes. When you see him, “nice dog” is not the phrase that springs to mind.

Some people say dog spelled backward is God. Gid spelled backward is Dig.

“Just Gid,” Drew tells Harley.

Gid got his name in the army. The shredded ear is courtesy of the service as well. The shelter dude said the dog left the service early because he lost his sense of mission, basically went AWOL and played catch with Afghan kids. As soon as she heard that, Drew felt a sense of kinship with the dog, a bond. She got blown up and put back together in Iraq. Lost her sense of mission, too, in the desert near Fallujah. The shrapnel in her left leg sets off screaming alarms at airports.

“Any problems tonight?” Harley asks. He’s a big man, soft in the middle, with graying hair combed over a shiny scalp.

“That light in the back row, it’s dead again.”

“I’ll get Parsons on it. Anything else?”

“Nope, it’s calm.”

She could have substituted boring for calm since guarding a tow lot is flat-out boring on the best of nights, but Drew doesn’t mind. The night work is an antidote for chronic insomnia, plus the lot perches on the edge of the waterfront, the tide ebbing and rising under the wharf. She doesn’t know Boston well, not yet, but her grandparents did, that’s one of the few things she recalls her dad telling her, how her forebears used to swim in the Charles when they were young, legally and safely at the old Magazine Street Beach, how they’d go boating in the harbor, the same harbor where a crate of plastic-wrapped assault weapons washed up last week, video at eleven on Breaking News, Channel 7.

The V.A. shrink says Drew came to the city to find her past. She doesn’t know about that, but she does know this: Patrolling perimeter when the path meanders along the Atlantic Ocean and the tiny lights of tugboats and cargo ships wink at you as they make their way into the harbor isn’t so bad. And she likes working with Gid. She isn’t so keen on Harley. He smells like sweat and tobacco, leers occasionally. Still, the job is an improvement over patrolling unnamed hunks of wind-scoured desert, and something better is bound to turn up.

“Gid want a treat?”

Harley tosses the biscuit to the ground. Gid eyes Drew till she gives an imperceptible nod. Then he scarfs it up. Rigid and unbending, Harley doesn’t come across as a dog lover, but he carries treats.

Drew wears jeans tucked into knee-high boots. Her long-sleeved tee melts into the darkness. She peers at the harbor lights, her stance balanced and ready. Her face is too thin, nose too sharp, eyes too big, but the whole thing pulls together; she’s attractive, could be striking if she bothered to care.

Harley hopes Drew’s thinking about him, but she’s contemplating that crate of shrink-wrapped assault weapons. Massachusetts has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation, but there are street corners in Boston where you can buy a gun more easily than you can buy a Charlie Card. Assault rifles ooze down from New Hampshire, inch up from the Carolinas, steal across borders from states with less-stringent statutes. Terrorist-wary transit cops check the trains and buses frequently. Could be the smugglers are using boats, but running guns into busy Boston Harbor where tourists stroll the waterfront and kids ride the merry-go-round on the Rose Kennedy Greenway doesn’t seem likely.

Harley clears his throat. “Gid, he ever try to jump in and go for a dip?”

“Scared of the water,” Drew says. Harley also parcels out overtime and writes employee evaluations.

Drew wants to be a cop. Vets like her get a leg up at the Boston Police Department, preferential treatment, but so far she hasn’t scored. There’s the not-so-small matter of the residency requirement. Cadets are supposed to reside in Boston, live in the city for at least a solid year. This poses a challenge for a woman currently living out of a rust-eaten Ford Escort.

The V.A. shrink she refuses to speak to, a doctor named Haggerty, sent her to a guy who knows a guy, which is, he assured Drew, the way they do it in Boston, but even the well-connected Sergeant Lorello, the man at the end of the who-do-you-know chain, didn’t see how he could bypass the residency thing.

Drew owes Gid for the job at Atlantic Tow. She’s applied for every PD and private-security job within fifty miles — Manchester, New Hampshire to Warwick, Rhode Island — but it was Gid, lapping up beer under a barstool, who did the trick, convinced a dude about to leave town to recommend Drew for his security gig. Man had a soft spot for ex-army dogs; his Humvee would have been junkyard salvage if a Malinois hadn’t sniffed out an IED.

The job is part-time with no benefits, but Drew considers working outdoors a benefit, along with the salty smell and the wind in her short, dark hair. Once winter sets in, the nights will get frigid, but she’s optimistic that by then someone will yank her application and note her stellar qualifications. Gid’s got the nose, but Drew’s got the eye. Guys used to think she was wearing night-vision goggles even when she wasn’t. She’s got an eye for motion; something moves in the dark, she knows it.

Drew has been on the job two weeks and three days when the dinghy sinks.

Three sides of the lot are bounded by electrified fence. The fourth is open to the ocean. The owner figures there’s little to no risk an angry motorist will venture a sea approach to reclaim a towed Chevy, but Drew’s not so sure. It’s ninety bucks a tow, plus a steep daily storage charge that adds outrage to aggravation. She’s glad her job is guarding the lot, not demanding payment from hostile car owners.

The night is clear after days of stormy weather, the sea calm, the air heavy with the elusive fall warmth the locals still call Indian Summer. Wisps of fog form at the shoreline where the cool ocean air meets the land. Drew doesn’t exactly see the boat come ashore, but she shifts to high alert about the same time Gid’s ears prick, and they move as one.

The wooden dinghy is small and the girl inside clings to the rotted pier. The boy is in the water, but as soon as Drew’s flashlight beam hits him, he hauls himself up over the side of the boat and drops winded into the bottom. The girl gulps a breath and yells, “Help,” the minute her eyes register Drew’s presence.

“I’ll call the—”

“No police,” the girl says immediately, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “No, he’ll kill me, please don’t.”

They work in pairs at Atlantic, but Drew’s coworker, Nate Parsons, is more handyman than security guard. Middle-aged, hard of hearing, he does an occasional walk-around, but mostly he sits in the shed nights, fiddling with his hearing aid and reading comic books. Drew suspects he’s related to the tow lot’s owners.

“Please don’t call the cops,” the girl says. “If you can’t help us, just give us a bucket and we’ll bail till we get somewhere we can come ashore.”

The girl’s teeth are chattering, Drew hasn’t got a convenient bailing bucket, and the leaky boat isn’t going anywhere but down. Drew steadies herself, wraps her left arm around a sturdy post, offers her right hand to the girl.

She hesitates. “What about the dog?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Drew says. Gid looks fierce, but he lost whatever fight he had back in Afghanistan. He paces restlessly, but keeps a good five feet between his forepaws and the end of the wharf.

The girl’s clothes are soaked and in disarray, jacket open, blouse half-unbuttoned, but her fingernails are long and painted, her hair shiny. She looks very young. Well kept.

“Help Joey up first,” she says. “We aren’t supposed to — If Daddy ever—”

“You first.” Drew doesn’t like the idea of grabbing the boy, not when she can’t see both of his hands. “Let Joey hang onto the pier and then we’ll bring him up together.” The girl is small, about the same size as Drew. If she turns out to be bad news, Drew can take her.

Turns out there’s nothing to take. The rescue is quick and easy; Nate doesn’t stir, both kids are okay, wet but resilient, ashamed of absconding in a leaky boat. Drew wonders whether the boat slipped its mooring while they were having sex. She doesn’t bother reporting the incident because she didn’t follow procedure, which says to call the cops on every intruder. Drew lost the desire to follow procedure back in Iraq.

Gid paces and growls, ears quivering, long after the couple departs. Man at the shelter said he’d never seen anything like it, the way the dog took to Drew, but tonight neither her voice nor the few low, bent notes she plays on her Hohner G harp quiet the dog. She carries a harp in her back pocket; a riff or two will usually settle Gid down when vocal soothing fails. Somebody or something did a number on him; he’s scared of more than water. Drew worries that the dog is too big a challenge right now, living in the car the way she is, new to the city, but if she hadn’t taken him in, he would have been destroyed. That’s what the guy at the shelter said.

It isn’t till Drew sees the girl again that she figures she’s been had.

She and Gid are covering a day shift, filling in for a sick worker. At first Drew thinks she’s mistaken. The girl’s jacket is navy with red trim and she looks much older with her blond hair swept up on top of her head. She sounds different too, but those knuckles, those fingernails, those earlobes, all the things Drew notices because those are the things you notice if you spend time in the military police, those are the same.

Drew’s lips tighten; she doesn’t like being played for a sucker, but she doesn’t say a word. Use your eyes, not your mouth; she’s learned that working with Gid.

The girl leaves the lot after picking up a big dark sedan that looks pretty much like any other big dark sedan. Drew takes note of the make, model, and plate number, and lo and behold, two of the three are the same four nights later when the car reappears on the lot, parked in the lane closest to the sea, even though the rest of yesterday’s towed vehicles are parked in the lane that fronts Commercial Street.

When the night-vision goggles Drew used to use on night patrol got replaced with better tech, she purchased the old ones for cents on the dollar. Bought a night-vision camera too. She’s glad she did; she didn’t steal them, and if she hadn’t splurged the stuff would have found its way into enemy hands via the black market.

“Let’s check it out, Gid.” She’s gotten into the habit of talking to the dog. He seems like a safer confidant than the V.A. shrink.

She uses the goggles at discrete intervals during her next three night shifts. Nate Parsons seems happy to work the front of the lot the few times he leaves the shed. Drew strolls the back till the boss calls her over for a chat. Harley says she’s doing a fine job and tells her a full-time position might open up soon. He asks a few questions about Gid, how long they’ve worked together, where she got him, then offers Gid another treat. Drew thinks it would creep people out if they knew how many vets came back to the States with night-vision equipment.

Even with the gogs, Drew finds it hard to see the boat. It’s definitely not the same leaky dinghy. That one was gray wood. This one is an inflatable black plastic on black water, no running lights, low and silent as it drifts under the pilings of the wharf.

The next morning the blond girl pays another fine, drives the big dark sedan off the lot. Drew can’t be sure, but she thinks the car rides lower than it did when it came in.

“You thinking drugs?” Sergeant Lorello asks when she describes the setup: ship-to-shore communication, a camouflaged hole in the wharf, a corresponding opening in the car’s undercarriage. Drew would dearly love to work for the Boston Police Department. A dream come true. She hopes her report will speed up her application to the police academy.

She shrugs. “Anything, really. Anything somebody doesn’t want to pay duty on, anything illegal.” She has a suspicion, but it’s more of a hunch, so she stays silent.

“You got video footage?”

“It’s not great.”

“Why don’t you leave it with me? Our techs can work wonders.”

The night-vision footage is already good enough to identify the guy in the inflatable: Joey, the same guy Drew yanked out of the water, the blond girl’s forbidden “date.” Joey looks vaguely familiar, but Drew can’t quite place him.

“Do you think I should quit?” Drew asks Lorello as she’s leaving.

“You think Atlantic Tow is in on it?”

She thinks lots of people pay cash to get their cars back and cash businesses are good for money laundering. Somebody at Atlantic’s involved, but she doesn’t know whether it’s the owner or a rogue employee.

“LDP Enterprises owns the lot,” she says. “They’re a subsidiary of something called Allied HD, but I haven’t been able to trace the ownership yet.”

The sergeant looks at her over the rim of his glasses. “How did you get that far?”

“Online. Mainly database stuff.” Homeowners all over Boston don’t bother to password-protect their Internet connections. It’s easier for Drew to find an Internet hot spot than a legit overnight parking space.

Lorello makes a mark on a sheet of paper. “Let me know if you see the girl again. And don’t stick your neck out, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You got a Boston address yet?”

“Soon,” Drew promises. The fact that he asks makes her feel hopeful.

Drew spends the next afternoon looking for an actual apartment, with thick enough walls to muffle the wail of blues harmonicas and a landlord who doesn’t mind dogs. She would kill for a window that looks out on water, a pond or a stream if not the ocean, some visual reassurance that she’s not in the desert, but the rents on water-views are so far beyond her reach she reluctantly mulls the possibility of a roommate.

That night things happen so fast she has almost no time to react.

It’s chilly; Indian Summer has disappeared as quickly as it came. The moon recedes behind a bank of thick clouds. The light in the back row is out again. She feels more than sees a faint slip of movement, an air current, and as she straightens, something slips over her head and quickly tightens around her neck. A hard blow rattles her skull.

In the army, Drew boxed bantamweight, 119, five foot five, but tonight nobody rings a bell. Her opponent outweighs her, lifts her easily off her feet. She goes limp. As soon as she feels her captor’s muscles relax, she snaps her arms, scissors her legs, and escapes, but the thing over her head means she can’t see, can hardly breathe. Her punches hit air. She whirls, dodges, kicks. Arms grip her again. She grabs back, determined to mark her attacker.

That’s what she told her troops: Mark the guy, always mark the guy.

Her feet keep kicking, but they no longer touch the wharf. Blinded, she hurtles through space. The icy water is such a shock she almost gulps it in with a shriek before clamping her lips.

Down is up; up down. Sightless, she has no sense of which way to go for oxygen. She wriggles and thrashes, but the cold water clutches her in its frozen fist and holds her fast. Her chest is bursting, her brain starts to fuzz, then something hits her in the side like a slow-moving missile. It shoves her, pushes her, won’t let her stay down or give up.

She breaks the surface, sluggish, every move a slow-motion exertion, an effort of will. Breathing is painful. Her ribs ache. Her throat is raw. She claws at the soaked film over her nose with stiff and useless fingers till she rips a ragged hole. The only real thing, the only welcoming thing, is wet fur. Gid, paddling silently beside her, noses her in the direction of the scummy shoreline. She grabs at his collar, hooks a finger through the lead.

Their exit from the ocean is less than elegant. They lie in a soaked heap for minutes that seem like hours, both panting, winded, before staggering the length of a cobblestoned wharf toward a streetlamp. A passing man gives Drew the look reserved for dissolute alcoholics. The second cab agrees to take her to the police station.

Halfway there, shivering, she changes course, asks him to drop her near her car. In the privacy of the backseat, she strips, pulls on most of her dry wardrobe at once, layer after layer. She towels her bedraggled companion off as quickly as she can, apologizing to him, praising him.

“Hey, Ace, hey, hotshot, I didn’t know you could swim. What the hell is swim spelled backward? That would sure make some rotten name, tough guy.” She keeps on talking till her voice stops shaking, till her limbs stop shaking, till she notices that Gid smells terrible and realizes that she smells awful too.

Rosie’s Place will never be mistaken for the Ritz, but they’ve got tiled showers. The volunteers and staff are incredibly kind. Drew feels guilty lying to them. It’s been a long time since she felt guilty lying. Lying, in her experience, has served her better than telling the truth.

When Drew doesn’t show up for work the next night, doesn’t call, doesn’t come, she doubts anyone will report her missing. She reappears the night after that, walks coolly into the shed, and sits on a rickety chair.

Nate Parsons, paging through a comic, wearing old corduroys and a T-shirt, looks comfortably set for the evening. When he glances up and sees her, the color leaves his face.

“Miss me?” Drew says.

He manages a strangled response. “I — uh — thought you were sick.”

“No. You thought I was dead.”

Parsons closes his comic book.

Drew keeps talking. “You ever try renting an apartment in this city? Expensive as hell. Security deposit, first month’s rent, last month’s rent. It really adds up to quite a sum.”

“So why you telling me?” His voice feigns ignorance, but his fingers unclench and his eyes let her know that he recognizes greed when he sees it. Greed is something he understands.

“Simple,” she says. “I want to know how much you’re willing to cut me in for.”

“Cut you in?”

“You must be making a pile. I just want a reasonable sum. There’s the girl and there’s Joey. Is that his real name? And there’s you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Joey looks like you. He your kid? Your nephew? You’re not having any trouble hearing me, are you?”

“Huh?”

“You missing a transmitter? Ship-to-shore? Sort of like this one I pulled off the guy who tried to drown me? Looks like a hearing aid?”

Parsons’ face is unscratched. She wasn’t able to mark him when she grabbed, but she got a reward for her effort nonetheless. He slaps a hand to his left ear as though he expects to find the gizmo behind his ear instead of nesting in the palm of Drew’s hand.

“How much?” he asks grudgingly.

“Depends on whether you’re moving cheap Tauruses, AR-Fifteens, or pricey H and Ks. How many guns a crate? How many crates a month? I’m willing to bargain.”

It’s the beginning of a long and detailed conversation. While she listens, Drew imagines the ATF agents slipping into place, surrounding the tow lot, deactivating the fence. She hits the floor the second the loudspeaker barks. Parsons is still sitting in his chair when the first agent bursts through the door. Two of them put him down on the floor. He stops protesting his innocence as soon as Drew opens her jacket and untapes the wire.

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms doesn’t bring Sergeant Lorello along for the fireworks. They scooped him up quietly at his house yesterday, around the same time a team picked up Joey. The girl’s in the wind. They say Lorello’s cooperating, but Drew figures she’s not going to get a slot at the BPD police academy on the sergeant’s say-so.

On the other hand, she’s made a few friends at ATF, and one of the agents thinks he might know a guy who knows a guy. That’s the way they do it in Boston.