The Best American Mystery Stories 2002

David Edgerley Gates The Blue Mirror

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

“You know how long a tail gunner’s supposed to last in combat?” Stanley asked me. “Twenty-four minutes, on average. Me, I beat the odds, did my fifty missions, came back to the States, went on a bond tour.” He shook his head ruefully. “Now the cancer’s got me, I won’t live out the year.”

I’d known Stanley Kosciusko most of my life. He came from Fitchburg, just north of Leominster, where me and my brother Tony grew up. There were quite a few Poles up there, close to the New Hampshire border, and a fair number of Finns, oddly.

The Poles had come originally to work in the paper and textile mills, the Finns to make furniture — Windsor chairs and dining room sets. Stanley had married a Finnish girl himself after the war. Maria Aho.

“You got to have an appreciation for life’s little ironies, ain’t it the truth?” he remarked.

Did his wife know? I wondered out loud.

“About the cancer, sure. This other thing, no.” It was the other thing he’d come to talk to me about.

“I lied about my age,” he went on. “Enlisted when I was seventeen. Wound up in a B-24 Liberator, flying out of Sicily bombing the Ploesti oilfields. Froze your ass off in those planes, but man, you’d sweat bullets when the German fighters came at you, Fockes and Messerschmitts. Anybody claims they weren’t scared stiff is retarded or just plain crazy.”

I was thinking about how old he was. Fifty-odd years since D-Day. Add it up, and Stanley was in his mid-seventies. He still seemed vigorous enough, but now that I knew what to look for. I saw the tightness around his eyes from holding in the pain, and a metallic cast to his skin, tarnished and dull. In the afternoon sunlight coming in my office windows I noticed he’d used some kind of rouge or blush to give his face the color it lacked. I figured that was harmless enough.

“Your dad was in the war, wasn’t he?” he asked.

“Different war,” I said. “Korea.”

Stanley nodded. “I knew that,” he said, as if it were important for me to understand he still had all his buttons. He’d dressed for the occasion, too, like he had to impress me.

Stanley was a retired auto body man. Tony and I had hung around his shop on Saturday mornings when we were kids because Stanley could fix anything. You could take him your bike or a broken kitchen appliance your mom was ready to throw out or a Lionel locomotive with a bad armature, and he’d make it work. He loved tools, not just what he used on the job, breaker bars and socket sets and orbital sanders, but old hand tools like rabbeting planes and Yankee drills, miter boxes and shake splitters, anything that had a purpose, because Stanley himself was purposeful. Me and Tony would hunt up objects in the abandoned mills and the local landfill just to have Stanley tell us what they were for. He’d examine a rusty, weathered thing, a spokeshave or a bit-and-brace with a corroded ratchet, and take it apart, clean it up, hone the bit or the blade, and put it back together so he could show you how well it suited your hand, you wanted to make a paper-tight join or dowel a table leg. He could repair a grandfather clock or a .22 rifle, and the trick was his curiosity, that certain knowledge that somebody else had made it, whatever it was, had designed it with a use in mind.

“I blame myself,” Stanley said. “You have to own up to the responsibility for what you’ve done or haven’t done.”

“Cancer’s not your fault, Stanley,” I said.

“You think I don’t know that?” He shifted his weight awkwardly, his suit making him self-conscious. “Jack, there’s somebody looking to hurt me. Or my family, which amounts to the same thing.”

His namesake was a Revolutionary War general who later went home to Poland and led a hopeless revolt against the Russians.

“Here’s what I need you to do for me,” he said. “I’m dying on the vine here. I got to have me a surrogate.”

I could still see him breaking some Cossack’s neck with his bare hands.

“See, if the damn Commies hadn’t killed Stosh over in Vietnam, things’d be different,” he said. “The way it is, I’m stuck with it. But me, I can’t hardly lift a glass.”

Life’s little ironies. If somebody’s going to be dead inside a year, what do you threaten him with? But more to the point, how do you turn him down when he asks you for help?

Here’s the rest of what Stanley told me. I was explaining it to my brother Tony over a beer.

“Stanley junior died in Vietnam, right?” he asked.

“First Cav,” I said.

Tony swung his wheelchair over to the sink. I’d just helped him move into this place, and he was still adjusting to being on his own. He’d resented being dependent, and once he was out of rehab he didn’t need nursing care, but it was a big step all the same. He rinsed out his beer bottle and left it on the drainboard. “And there’s a grandson?”

“Andy. Andy Ravenant. He took his stepfather’s name after his mom remarried, but he and Stanley have always been close.”

“Ravenant. Why’s that name ring a bell?”

“You used to see his ads on late-night TV, after Star Trek. Raving Richie Ravenant. Sold rugs and wall-to-wall.”

“Out in Lynn on the discount strip?”

“Next door to Adventure Car-Hop, home of the Ginsburger.”

“He must do a pretty high volume,” Tony said. “You’d think somebody would go after the carpet king, not Stanley.”

“Except the stepdad’s been dead for eight years, and Andy’s mom lives in Florida.”

“Puts a crimp in that line of inquiry.”

“Assuming you were using Andy for leverage,” I said.

“Unless it’s the other way around.”

I took my own bottle to the sink, rinsed it out, and got two more out of the fridge. I cracked the tops.

“Okay,” Tony said, taking the beer I handed him, “why is who-ever-this-is bothering Stanley? If they’ve got a beef with the kid, what’s it have to do with the grandfather? And how did Stanley get wind of it anyway?”

Stanley was seeing a specialist out at Beth Israel, off the Jamaica-way. He’s coming out of the hospital, headed for where he’d parked on Brookline Avenue, and some greaseball — Stanley’s description — starts giving him a hard time.

“Explain that a little better,” Tony said. “This guy comes out of nowhere?”

“Apparently,” I said. “Stanley’s like, hel-LO, what’s your story? Homeless vet, willing to work for food?”

“I take it not, unhappily.”

The guy’s trying to act smooth, but he’s antsy, like he has someplace else to be and this is just a pit stop.

“Coked up?” my brother asked.

“Good observation,” I said. “Except that Stanley wouldn’t know what to look for. I’m reading between the lines. The dude was looking over his shoulder.”

“Sorry,” Tony remarked, smiling. “You were saying?”

According to Stanley, the guy couldn’t seem to get to the point, or it was like he was talking in code. He kept using these veiled, oblique references as if they were supposed to make sense to Stanley, and Stanley finally gets fed up and just steps around him. The other guy is so frustrated with Stanley for, like, willfully refusing to understand that he calls after him he’ll send him his grandson’s tongue in a pickle jar.

“This is the first overt mention of Andy, right?”

“Right. The rest of it’s been this sly jive-ass hinting around.”

“I can see this going one of two ways,” Tony said. “Or one of one, namely Stanley drop-kicking the guy to Chestnut Hill.”

“Except that he’s past seventy and he’s on heavy medication and he doesn’t know what any of it’s about.”

“So he suppresses his natural instinct to scrub the bricks with this yo-yo’s face, not to mention that he’s maybe no longer the man he once was, and he comes to you.”

“Pretty much.”

Tony pursed his lips. “Where do you start?” he asked.

“I start with Stanley’s grandson.”

“The kid.”

“He’s not a kid, exactly.” In fact, Andy was close to my brother’s age. He was thirty-one, an attorney. Criminal law, unglamorous but always in demand. He’d done a couple of years as a public defender in Suffolk Superior Court, and now he was in private practice, with an address downtown on Milk Street.

“You hoping that dog will hunt?” Tony asked.

“Andy’s more likely to have enemies than his grandfather.”

“Yeah, you’d think so,” Tony said, but he seemed distracted by something, a thought hovering on the periphery.

“What?” I asked him.

“I can’t put my finger on it,” he said. “Maybe if I’d quit chasing after it, it would stop ducking out of sight.”

The offices of Ravenant & Dwyer were at the bottom edge of the financial district, in the shadow of the Customs House tower. It was one of the oldest sections of town, built over again and again, but like the North End or Beacon Hill, you could still see an imprint of how Boston had once been laid out back in the eighteenth century when its commerce depended on shipping and the narrow, crooked streets led down to the harborfront. The traffic then would have been horse-drawn wagons and drays lurching over the cobblestones and the small businesses would have been ship’s chandlers and jobbers, sailmakers’ lofts, and rope factories. It remained a commercial district, outlets for wholesale plumbing supplies and the like at street level, and the tenants in the offices on the upper stories were a similar mix of tradesmen and professionals, but they offered a different range of services these days. Andy’s law office was one flight up, the entry door sharing a small landing with a jeweler and an architectural drafting studio. I had a ten o’clock appointment.

I gave the receptionist my name and sat down to wait.

I’d waited all of forty-five seconds when Andy Ravenant stepped out of an inner office, came through the small wicket that fenced the receptionist off from clients, and stuck out his hand as I got to my feet. We shook hands.

“I remember you and your brother from my grandfather’s body shop,” he told me, smiling.

I had a vague recollection of his father, Stan Jr., but I didn’t remember Andy at all. Of course, if I’d been seven or eight, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to some four-year-old kid if I didn’t have to. I decided not to say that.

He took me into his office. It was small and lined with law books — Massachusetts General Statutes, extracts from federal rulings, bound trial transcripts. We sat down.

“Okay,” Andy said, leaning back and tenting his hands in front of his sternum. “What’s got Papa Stan’s bowels in such an uproar? He’s been evasive with me.”

“Did you know he was dying of cancer?” I asked him. I knew it was sudden, but I couldn’t afford to spare his feelings.

Andy sat up abruptly, his face frozen.

I made an apologetic gesture. “He’s told your grandmother about it, and he told me yesterday,” I said. “I guess he hasn’t gotten around to making it general knowledge.”

“Jesus,” Andy said softly. “I knew he was coming into town for treatments, but I didn’t realize how bad it was. He’s such a tough old bastard. You figure somebody like that’s going to die standing up. He won’t go for being an invalid.”

“Yeah, that’s the way I read it,” I said.

“Why did he come to see you, Jack?”

“Somebody threatened him,” I said. “In actual point of fact, they threatened you. Why they’d go after Stanley I don’t know. It seems sideways, or backwards.”

“What was it about?”

“The guy didn’t say, that’s the trouble.”

“Who was this guy?”

I shrugged. “Some cretin, according to your grandfather. Stanley didn’t give me much to go on, but it sounded like he was supposed to warn you off something.”

“My particular client base, that could mean damn near anything,” Andy said. He picked up the phone and punched one of the intercom buttons. “Hey,” he said, “you got a minute?” He paused and then nodded. “Bring him along,” he said to whoever was on the line, and hung up. “Let’s check it out,” he said.

There was a light tap on the door, and two people came into Andy’s office, a man and a woman.

I got up to shake hands as Andy made the introductions.

The woman was Catherine Dwyer, Andy’s law partner. Kitty was of medium height with thick, dark hair cut short and that luminous Irish complexion, like Spode porcelain. She was very trim in a silk pants suit, but she would have turned heads if she’d been wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt. I felt awkward and foolish all of a sudden, as if we were on a first date.

The guy was Max Quinn, a big beefy job with a white sidewall haircut. He looked like an ex-cop, which is what he turned out to be, a private license who did legwork for Ravenant & Dwyer.

“Jack Thibault,” he said, grinning. “I hearda you. You’re the hockey player’s brother.”

“That’d be me,” I agreed.

“What’s the pitch?” he asked.

Andy gave them a quick outline, nothing about the cancer, just the fact that someone seemed to be using his grandfather to get at him.

Both of them picked up on it without needing more.

“Current caseload, what do you think?” Kitty asked, turning toward Max Quinn.

He pulled a face. “There’s that little squirrel Donnie Argent,” he told her. “He’s tight with those bums in Revere, or he’d like us to think.”

“Ring of chop shops,” Kitty explained to me. “Who else?”

“The dopers over in Charlestown,” Max said.

“That’s one of mine,” Andy told me. “Kids just getting into the heavy. Too scared to roll over on their wholesaler and plead out.”

“I don’t blame them,” Quinn said. “That’d be Chip McGill.”

“Something there?” Kitty asked him.

He shrugged. “You know that neighborhood, they’re like the freaking Sicilians — omérta — or, anyway, before the made guys started falling over their own feet, they were in a rush to rat each other out to the feds.”

“Everybody dummies up,” Kitty said to me. “Even these kids know better than to drop a dime on their connections.”

“Who’s Chip McGill?” I asked.

“Dealer,” Quinn said. “Methamphetamine, mostly. Roofies, angel dust, some psychedelics. Party animal. Runs with a bunch of Hell’s Angels wannabes, call themselves the Disciples.”

“I thought they were out of Springfield,” I said.

Quinn gave me a reappraising look. “Good call,” he said.

“You figure they might be looking to open up a new market?” I asked him.

He nodded. “McGill’s a local boy, grew up around Monument Square. Been in the rackets since God was a child. He cuts his overhead, he can get crystal direct from the source. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

Symbiotic wasn’t the kind of five-dollar word I expected to be in Max Quinn’s vocabulary. It must have shown on my face.

He grinned. “It’s what you get, you hang around with these college kids,” he said.

McGill and the bikers sounded promising, and I said so.

“I see a downside to this,” Kitty Dwyer said.

Quinn and I looked at her.

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with McGill and Jack starts sniffing around him, it’s going to raise a red flag,” she said. “We could regret it.”

“McGill’s got no reason to think our clients are about to testify against him,” Andy put in, “and we wouldn’t want to give him one, but that’s the lawyer in me talking.”

“Makes our situation a little ticklish,” Quinn observed.

He didn’t actually seem that bothered by it. I figured his way would be to jam McGill up and take whatever came next.

Kitty thought the same, apparently. “You know, Max, a full frontal assault might be counterproductive,” she commented.

“Shortest distance between two points,” he said. “You got your Polish grandfather on the one hand, and you got Chip McGill on the other. I’d sooner take McGill off the board.”

“So would I,” Andy said. “I know we’ve got an obligation to those kids, Kitty, they’re our clients, but if Chip McGill is trying to muscle Papa Stan, I vote we ask him about it.”

“Ask?” Quinn didn’t sound too thrilled.

“Feel him out, I mean,” Andy said. “If he’s got legitimate concerns, we put his mind at rest.”

It sounded a little too much like a euphemism for me. Andy seemed to be giving Quinn the go-ahead to lean on McGill.

“Your grandfather went to Jack, remember. He didn’t come to you,” Kitty said. “Maybe he doesn’t want us involved.”

Quinn gave her a sleepy glance.

“Well?” Andy was looking at me. “What do you say to that, Jack? You want to fly solo?”

“Give me a day, maybe,” I said.

“Max?” Andy asked him.

“No problem,” Quinn said.

“Watch your step,” Kitty Dwyer said to me.

Did she mean with Max or McGill? I wondered.

“You’ll keep us in the loop?” Andy asked.

“Of course,” I said.

Kitty walked me out, leaving Quinn and Andy together. She could have wanted a minute alone with me, and she seemed to be making up her mind whether or not to tell me something. We were out on the landing at the top of the stairs when she spoke up.

“It might be personal,” she said.

“You mean, nothing to do with one of the law firm’s cases?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Andy have any skeletons in his closet?”

“I’m not the one to ask,” she said, which only suggested to me that she was.

“If you think of something, will you give me a call?”

“I was thinking I’d call you anyway,” she said, smiling.

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but I was all too aware of her eyes on my back as I went down to the street.

I’d parked over by India Wharf. I was walking back along the waterfront toward my car when I passed an espresso bar with an outside deck and decided to get a cup of coffee. I went in and ordered a latte and took it out onto the deck, where I could sip it and look at the harbor.

It was Indian summer, late October, when the nights are crisp but during the day it can be almost balmy. The sky was nearly cloudless, and sunlight glanced off the oily water. Herring gulls swooped for floating trash and fought over it when they got something. A container ship moved down the channel, headed out toward the bay. It might be going up the coast to the Maritimes or south through the Cape Cod Canal to New York or the mouth of the Chesapeake.

There is a romance to ships, to cast off on a voyage and leave the land behind. The sea is a different place, with different rules, where the hopes and vanities of men have small effect. The kinds of problems I dealt with in my line of work usually boiled down to basic, base motivations. Envy. Lust. Greed. They might seem like primal forces of nature to the people they took possession of, but if you balanced them against the brute power of the North Atlantic, they stood for nothing.

It helped to put things in a healthier perspective. I thought about Stanley in the belly of a bomber, where life could be measured in moments, the flak and the German fighters, the odds against survival. I finished my coffee and turned away from the briny smell of the harbor, the moving water slopping at the pilings, and went inside to use the pay phone.

I called a cop I knew downtown. Frank Dugan owed me a favor, and I was lucky enough to catch him at his desk. There was an open case file on the Disciples, he told me, going back a few years.

“They’re a pretty strong presence, the Springfield-Hartford corridor, out in the Berkshires, too,” Dugan said. “A while back DEA and the state cops ran an operation against them, shut down a lot of their traffic, busted some cookers, but the gang bounced back. That’s the trouble with speed. Doesn’t take much to set up a lab once you figure a way to mask the odors.”

“What about the recipe?”

Ingredients weren’t that hard to come by, he explained.

“Basic pharmaceutical supplies, ephedrine, phenylacetone, hydrochloric acid. Thing to look out for, it’s dangerous, cooking meth. You’re working with volatile materials, you can blow yourself up. And then there’s the fumes. That’s a giveaway, the smell of acetone and ammonia, like nail polish or cat urine, plus you got your toxic slurry, four or five pounds of waste for each pound of product. Two ways to go. You stake out an industrial area with a lot of smudge and smut, or you go out in the boonies where the neighbors don’t complain.”

“So it’s messy, and it stinks, and it’s an explosive mix,” I said. “Which makes it sound perfect for a crew of sociopathic losers like these outlaw bikers.”

I could hear Dugan sucking on his teeth. “Far be it from me to step on your toes, Jack, but the Disciples are a seriously mean outfit. How’d you fasten onto this?”

“Guy name of Chip McGill, over in Charlestown,” I told him. “I heard they were his new source for product.”

There was an even longer silence this time around.

I waited him out.

“You sure know how to pick ’em,” he said at last. “You’re headed for a long walk off a short pier, you fish that water.”

“Care to give me a little more detail?”

“Okay. Chip McGill’s the type, he’s burning the candle at both ends. He’s a loose cannon, and sooner or later the Bunker Hill boys are going to take him out. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t already turned up in the trunk of a parked car out in the long-term lot at Logan.”

Long-term parking at the airport was a favored method of putting a dead body on ice. It did double duty. First, the crime scene was stale by the time Homicide got to it, but there was a secondary benefit. A corpse left unattended swells with fluids and eventually bursts and putrefies. Nobody wants his family to see him like that. So it was an object lesson.

“Anyway, your little pal there, this McGill, he’s a bad apple, take my word for it,” Dugan went on. “He’s got a sheet going back to juvie, he’s done time for distribution, he’s been pulled in on assault, conspiracy, murder. Whether it stuck to him or not, we’re talking mainline hood here. He’s been on the radar a while. Major Crimes wants him bad.”

“I don’t know as that’s really my lookout, Frank,” I said. “I just don’t want to accidentally stumble into a rat’s nest.”

“You will be, you try to put the arm on this chump.”

“Far as I know, McGill is in the background,” I said, “part of the scenery.”

“I think you’re horsing me around, but I guess it’s not for me to say,” he remarked. “My advice would be to walk away.”

“I’m not out to bust the guy’s chops. All I want is a quiet word.”

“Chip McGill is a nut job, and a speed freak on top of it,” Dugan said. “Give him an excuse, he’ll whack you out.”

“Well, that’s not very encouraging,” I said.

“It’s not supposed to be. The point is, all you have to do is wait about six months, and he won’t be a problem.”

“Yeah, I understood you the first time. Somebody with a bone to pick is likely to put the guy in the ground. Trouble is that I don’t have six months to wait.”

“Do what you gotta do,” Dugan said.

“What about habits and habitat?” I asked him.

“He holds court at a joint called the Blue Mirror, by the Navy Yard. You know it?”

I was afraid I did.

“Most every afternoon between four and six. Happy hour.”

“That’s pretty deep in Indian Country,” I said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you,” Dugan said cheerfully and hung up.

Boston is a town known for its tough, parochial neighborhoods, Southie, Charlestown, the North End, Fields Corner and Savin Hill in Dorchester, and the neighborhood bars that cater to the locals are often like ethnic social clubs, friendly and familiar to initiates but suspicious of outsiders.

The Blue Mirror was in Charlestown, right outside the main gates of the Navy Yard, where the USS Constitution is berthed.

The yard’s fallen on hard times since the seventies, deactivated with defense cutbacks, new keels being laid at Bath Iron Works in Maine and down at Norfolk and out on the West Coast in Puget Sound. Developers have had their eye on it over the years and now it’s a National Historic Site, but as a shipbuilding facility and a port of call for bluewater sailors, it’s been mothballed. Even when the yard was an active military installation, though, the Blue Mirror was off-limits to enlisted personnel.

There were rougher places, I’m sure, but you probably had to go to Belfast or Kingston, Jamaica, to find them. All the same, at four-thirty in the afternoon it looked pretty tame. A couple dozen vehicles were parked outside, vans, pickups, muscle cars, along with some choppers, low-slung panhead Harleys sporting ape-hangers and chromed valve covers. I went on in.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The room was long and low, opening up like a keyhole at the far end, where there was a small hardwood dance floor and a band was doing a sound check, testing levels. The bar itself ran along the near wall, probably thirty-five or forty feet, with two guys working behind the stick. The only lighting was a set of pinpoint spots down the back bar, the narrow focus putting the bottles on the shelves in high relief and making the liquor seem lit from within, like coals. Having the light behind them, the bartenders were in silhouette, so their faces were unreadable. The effect was a little sinister, but I guessed it might even be intentional, giving them the edge on a rowdy crowd when the clock edged last call.

They had Sam Adams on tap. I ordered a draft. Glancing down at the bar, I saw there seemed to be loose change scattered all over it, but when I tried to nudge a dime with my finger, I realized the coins were polyurethaned into the surface. It made me feel like a dope for falling for it, and it marked me as a stranger in a place where I wanted to be taken for furniture. I nursed my beer and looked around.

Given that it was a little shy of quitting time for a day job, the Mirror was pretty busy, and most of the people in there were guys. Not many of them were dressed like they’d come from work, either. Nobody in coveralls wearing a hammer holster or spattered with paint, anyway. Everyone seemed to be wearing aggressive casual, double-knits or Dockers depending on the age bracket.

I picked up my beer and wandered down the bar toward the bandstand. Tucked around the corner was a pool table, a quarter a game. The guy leaning over the table to break was wearing colors, biker leathers with an elaborate design on the back like an old Grateful Dead album. He broke open the rack but didn’t make any balls, and when he straightened up, I could make out the gang insignia better. It looked like a representation of Leonardo’s Last Supper but with Satan at the head of the table. Hitler, Idi Amin, and the Ayatollah were among his guests. Underneath, in Gothic script, was a legend that read THE DISCIPLES. I turned back to the bar, ordered a second beer, and asked for my change in quarters.

The girl the biker was playing pool with looked underage, strung-out sixteen, no more than a hundred pounds wringing wet, tie-dyed tank top and jeans she kept tugging up because she didn’t have any hips for them to hang on to. But she had tattoos across her shoulder blades and enough piercings to set off a metal detector — ear clips and a stud in her lower lip and one at the outer edge of each eyelid, the extreme outer edge where it wouldn’t scratch the sclera of her eyes if she looked sideways. She made five solids without breaking a sweat and then scratched with a cross-corner shot on the seven.

I stepped over and put my quarter up for the next game.

Neither one of them seemed to pay any attention to me. The biker was studying the way the table lay. He was shooting stripes, and he had two pockets safed, his balls hanging on the lip, duck shots, but in the way of her making a ball. He took a harder shot, banking one up and back, and made it. She thumped her cue on the floor, acknowledging a good call. He kept moving around the table, sinking his other six balls, and then blew the eight, slamming it too hard so it popped back out of the side pocket. The girl dropped the rest of the solids and sank the eight in a corner. She glanced over at me.

It was probably then that I made my first mistake. I’d assumed they were a couple, although the biker had a good twenty years on her. He had red hair pulled back in a shaggy ponytail, and you could see the streaks of gray in it. And he had kind of a Zapata mustache, drooping past the corners of his mouth. It showed white next to his chin. The mistake was that I spent more time on him than her. Young girl, but skinny as she was, I still should have been looking down the front of her shirt after I put my money in, the balls dropped and I racked, and she bent over the table to break. Anybody else would have.

Like a dummy I went for the target too quickly. The girl was running the table on me, and I stood back a little, just outside the edge of the light that picked out the balls on the green felt, making the colors pop. She made six balls before I got a shot, and then she left me safed behind one of her own high balls. I called a bank, made it by some miracle, and then blew a much easier shot on the four in the side. I stepped away from the table again, shrugging philosophically, and went to stand next to the redheaded biker. “Need to get my chops up, I guess,” I remarked.

“Girl plays a mean stick,” he said.

She took the eight on a long bank, back up in the corner, and he went over to the table to rack. I put another quarter up to play the winner.

The thing was, their concentration on the game wasn’t fierce at all. The girl played deliberately but not as if anything were at stake. Her pride wasn’t involved. She simply took each shot as it came and seemed to be playing more against herself than the biker. For his part, it didn’t bother him if she had the better eye and control of the cue ball with English that would have made Minnesota Fats and Fast Eddie Felton give her a second look. He wasn’t indifferent, or just humoring her, but he wasn’t threatened by it.

I was watching him bridge to make a shot when I saw the jail-house tattoo on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger: 1 %. It took me a minute to get it. One percent.

Back when Marion Brando made The Wild One and biker gangs were exotic, some square made the remark that motorcycles were ridden by family men and it was only that one percent that gave bikes a bad name. Now, anybody who’s hung out with bikers knows they can be family men, for openers, but that’s not the point.

Bikes have never lived down that outlaw image, and of course it’s part of their appeal, especially riding a big Harley instead of a rice-burner, but Red was flaunting it. The colors, the attitude. Maybe he was for real, or maybe it was all show and no go. I had a funny feeling he was profiling, trying it on for size, and trying just a little too hard.

When he missed a shot and came back to where I was standing, leaving the table to the girl, I made a clumsy remark about speed. I wasn’t trying for subtlety, mind you, but it was all too obvious what I was fishing for.

“You looking to score some flake?” He sounded almost bored with the transaction.

“Weight, not just a couple of lines,” I said.

He nodded, not bothering to look at me, still watching the girl shoot pool. “I think you mistook me for somebody else,” he said without glancing in my direction.

I shrugged. “I figured to cut out the middleman,” I told him. “McGill steps on his product because he’s trying to make up in volume what he uses himself. I’ve got motivated buyers but they don’t like being cheated, and maybe it’s time you found a new pipeline.”

“Sing a different song, bro,” he remarked edgily.

“He’ll bring you all down, you don’t jerk his leash,” I said.

He looked at me finally, losing patience. “I’m trying to shoot a game here,” he said. “You’re rubbing up too close, and it’s giving me a rash.”

“You don’t think Chip McGill’s a loose cannon?” I asked. “How come he’s trying to muscle Andy Ravenant, then? Seems like a good way to attract the wrong kind of attention.”

I had Red’s interest now, but I didn’t think I’d struck a nerve. It was more puzzled curiosity, like how’d I come up with this angle and where the hell was I going with it.

“I hear Ravenant’s defending a couple of neighborhood kids on a drug fall, but he can’t plead them out unless they agree to burn Chip,” I told him. “Think there’s anything to it?”

“What in the name of sweet Jesus Christ is your game, pal?” he asked.

“I travel in a lot of weird company,” I said. “I make connections. That’s my stock in trade, putting things together. I’m what they call a rainmaker, seeding the clouds.”

“You’re a goddamn parasite,” Red said.

“Whatever,” I said. “I’m still in the market.”

He leaned his cue against the wall. “Let’s go out back for a taste, where we can talk more private,” he said.

He went through the fire door behind him, and I followed. We were outside by the dumpster behind the building. His bike was on its kickstand there. He opened the saddlebags and felt around inside. It was still light out, the sky pearling toward dusk, the shadows long across parking lot. The girl came out through the fire door.

“Hey, darlin’,” Red said.

“Hey yourself,” she said. “I’m starting to flag.”

“Got what you need,” he said, straightening up with a small Baggie in his hand.

And that was my second mistake, if anybody’s counting, to be watching him instead of watching my back, figuring her for a crank slut out to score a free pop. She kicked me so hard in the back of the knee that I went cross-eyed from the pain as my leg collapsed, and the two of them were on top of me like a snake on soap. She jerked the .40 Smith out of my waistband at the small of my back and wedged the muzzle into the base of my skull, notching the hammer back. The oily click sounded like a twig breaking. Red pinched the bridge of my nose between his knuckles and forced my head back, the gun digging into my spinal cord. I felt dizzy and ready to throw up. The girl giggled.

“No cop with any street sense would be that obvious,” Red said, leaning down to stick his face into mine. “You take the cake for stupid, bud.”

He had that part right. Stupid was my middle name.

“I ask myself, what’s your stake in it? And what I come up with is, you’re on your own. So what’s this jive you’re giving me about Chip McGill and the lawyer? My guess is you’re running interference for somebody, so who sent you?”

My mind wasn’t working fast enough to come up with a plausible answer. They say the prospect of an imminent hanging is supposed to sharpen your faculties, but a psychopathic meth groupie holding a gun to my head had filled it with white noise.

My tank was dry, and I was sucking air.

“Now, darlin’, you best let me have that thing,” Red said. “I think you’re liable to pop a cap on this old boy afore I even have the chance to loosen his tongue.”

He might have put his thumb between the hammer and the frame as he slipped the gun away from her, but I wasn’t breathing any easier. She could have shot me by accident, or just to see which way my brains went on the pavement. Red was likely to shoot me on purpose, if I couldn’t talk him out of it.

“Care to set my mind at rest, bro?” he asked me.

He’d let go of my nose and the Smith wasn’t cutting into my neck anymore, but I was scared to tell him nothing and just as nervous about saying something dumb.

“I can’t hear you,” he crooned, leaning close again like a father confessor.

“Hear this?” another voice inquired, and the next sound was unmistakable, the slide on a pump shotgun being racked.

Red went absolutely still.

“We’ll do this by the numbers,” the new guy said. I’d heard his voice before, but I couldn’t place it. “Point the weapon away from your body and safe it.” Red uncocked the Smith. “Good. Now put it down and back away. You too, girlie. I got no compunction about taking you off at the knees.”

I felt them give me some room. I glanced around.

“You’re looking a little the worse for wear, Jack,” Max Quinn said to me, grinning. He was holding a Mossberg pump at port arms, relaxed and obviously enjoying himself. “You able to walk?”

I picked up my gun and got carefully to my feet. I had to favor my left leg to get it to hold my weight.

“Now, about these two,” Max said. I had some ideas on that score, but what I wanted to do was likely to see me pulling eight to ten at MCI Cedar Junction.

“No?” Max asked. He shrugged. “Well, in that case, we’ll take our leave of you lovely people,” he said to Red and the girl. “I’d think it right intelligent if you’d just lie down on the pavement until we left.”

The girl hadn’t even looked at me while this whole business was going on, but Red was watching me with a hostile squint.

“I meant now, people,” Max said. They got down and assumed the position.

I limped toward my car, and Max backed away behind me, the shotgun held down next to his leg, where it was less conspicuous.

The lights were coming on in the parking lot.

He leaned down to the window when I got behind the wheel. “This probably isn’t the place to talk,” he said.

“I’ll call you,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No sweat,” he told me.

I watched him cross the street to where he was parked and put the shotgun in his trunk. He’d probably had me under surveillance from the time I walked into the bar. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it seemed a little too convenient.

Max gave me a wave as I drove away and climbed into his own car. I went home to pack my sore knee in ice and brood about how big a dope I’d been.

“So you figure the bikers are a red herring?” Tony asked the next morning.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I think Quinn set me up, yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not dirty.”

“Quinn just wants to make himself look good?”

“Pulling my chestnuts out of the fire? That’s one way of looking at it. Or he could be using me as a stalking horse, get them looking in the wrong direction.”

“Andy Ravenant?”

“Yeah, something’s hinky,” I said. “But I don’t see how it connects to the Stanley problem.”

We were driving out to the hospital in Ayer to see Stanley. He’d collapsed the day before while I was busy getting myself washed, dried, and folded. He wasn’t home — he was out cruising junkyards or something, up in apple orchard country — and the paramedics got him to the closest ICU. Once he was stabilized, he’d probably be moved into town to Peter Bent Brigham if things still looked bad.

“Any other irons in the fire?”

I shook my head. “I was hoping Stanley might come up with something else I could use,” I said. “Only trouble is, I’ve got nothing to give him in return.”

The hospital was fairly new, built sometime in the early seventies. I guessed. It was on a rise north of town, set off from neighbors, with a view through the trees to a small pond. A lot of the country villages beyond 495, the outer beltway, have become bedroom communities for the high-tech industries along Route 128, but Ayer is an anomaly. It sits outside the main gates of Ft. Devens, and for a good sixty years or more it’s been a company town supported by the army presence. Now there was talk of closing down the post. There was still a squadron of Ranger choppers based out there, and some logistical and support operations, but there was no longer a captive population of enlisted dependents, and the rental market was going down the tubes. Not a bad thing considering how local landlords had gouged the GIs with inflated rates. And the used-car dealers out on the Shirley road no longer had such easy prey. But the downside was that the bottom had fallen out of the tax base, and maintaining a decent hospital was suddenly a squeeze.

Tony wasn’t crazy about the hospital scene in any case. He’d spent too much time helpless on his back after he’d gotten creamed on the ice, but he was still game to go in and visit Stanley. I got his wheelchair out of the back seat, unfolded it, and helped him lever himself out of the front seat and into it. I was awkward about it, but Tony had long since gotten over any embarrassment.

“How’s your leg?” he asked.

I had an Ace bandage wrapped around my knee, but the tendon was still badly swollen and it felt like I had a lemon wedged behind the joint. I couldn’t bend my leg, and I couldn’t put any weight on it, either. Not that I didn’t feel foolish, since it was my own fault.

“Shouldn’t have turned your back on a woman,” Tony said.

“Don’t get me started,” I told him.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Tony said. “It’s not about sex, or gender, or whether she’s a victim herself. I only meant you shouldn’t take anything for granted.”

The thing about being brothers us that you figure you’re always in competition one way or another, but then they somehow manage to sneak under your radar.

We made our way through the automatic doors into the lobby.

Stanley was down the hall in a private room. We startled Maria when we went in. I realized she’d dozed off sitting next to Stanley’s bed, and it took her a moment to gather her wits.

Tony unbridled the charm. He had a gift for it, an effortless interest, because it was genuine. He rolled his wheelchair over next to Maria, not so close he was crowding her space, but making himself available. I didn’t hear what he said to her, but she smiled bravely and took his hand.

Stanley seemed to be just coming to, floating in a sea of painkillers and barely breaking water. I had the feeling he was losing buoyancy. He made an effort to focus.

“Hey,” I said, leaning in close so he’d recognize me.

“Jack,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Who’s that with you?”

“My brother Tony,” I told him.

He nodded, smiling, his eyes fluttering closed. “Always liked having you two come around,” he murmured. “Liked having kids at the shop. Reminded me of Stosh. Kept me alive during the war, knowing I had a boy I had to come home to.” His concentration was drifting, the drugs in the intravenous drip clouding his thoughts. He’d cut his moorings and was headed out to sea. “The Blue Mirror,” he muttered indistinctly.

I thought I’d misheard him. “What?” I asked, too sharply.

Tony had caught it. He swiveled around.

Stanley was in a reverie. “That’s what we used to call it, the Adriatic,” he said, so softly I had to bend over the bed.

“The blue mirror. On bombing runs into Rumania. Before you had to worry about the fighters. It looked beautiful, but it was hard as iron if your plane went down. I used to write letters to my son in my head, but I always forgot them by the time we got back.”

I glanced at Tony.

“I always forgot,” Stanley whispered, sinking back into the pillows, exhausted.

I straightened up.

Tony caught my attention, and belatedly I went over to pay my respects to Maria. I always feel awkward in situations where I have to pretend everything’s swell. I get claustrophobic and look for an early avenue of escape. Tony smoothed us out of it, covering our retreat.

We were just ducking out the door when Stanley revived long enough to say something else. “Bees,” he said, and fell back.

“Bees?” I asked Tony. I was driving him home, and he was sunk in his own thoughts. I figured he was brooding about the transience of human endeavor and Stanley in particular, but I’d missed a turn in the road while Tony had taken it.

“Guy name of Creek Fortier, you remember him?” Tony asked.

That was going back a ways. “Big guy with a beard, kind of rough around the edges but basically shy?”

Tony nodded. “Rode a thousand-CC Vincent,” he said.

“Right,” I said as the details started coming back to me. “Used to pull into Stanley’s shop once in a while, looking to cannibalize scrap. I remember the bike, a Shadow or a Lightning he’d restored. Why, what about him?”

“He was in Vietnam with Stanley’s son Stosh.”

I didn’t know where Tony was going, but I was willing to hitch a ride.

“Fortier came back, but Stan junior didn’t,” I said. “You’re thinking what?”

“I’m wondering if Creek Fortier weren’t a kind of surrogate son,” Tony said. “A way for Stanley to hang on to Stosh.”

“It’s a reach, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah,” Tony said, “but I knew there was something floating around in my head that I couldn’t put a name to. The kid, Andy, he would have been four or five years old at the outside, so you and me, we were too grown up to pay him any mind, right? He was underfoot, we probably treated him like the measles.”

I’d thought the same thing when I saw Andy in his office. When you’re in third or fourth grade, you don’t want some “baby” dragging on your coattails.

“Here’s how I remember it, though,” Tony went on. “Creek Fortier always had the time to humor Andy whenever he came by Stanley’s. It was like he was more comfortable on a kid’s level than he was with adults.”

“You see something unhealthy there?”

“No, that’s not what I’m getting at,” Tony said. “There was something simple about him, in the old-fashioned sense, like he was a case of arrested development.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder?” I suggested.

Tony nodded. “Yeah, shell-shock, battle fatigue, whatever you want to call it. Stanley was always very protective, looked out for him, treated him gently.”

“Walking wounded,” I said.

“More than that,” Tony said. “I mean, not just being a good Christian. We both know Stanley’s a decent guy. I’m thinking he appointed himself Creek’s guardian angel, ran interference for him, paid off his bad debts. Basically assumed the burden, in other words.”

“Stanley lost a son, and Creek Fortier stood in for him.”

“I hadn’t thought about it for years,” Tony said. “Fortier had a place out in the sticks, up by Pepperell or Townsend, near the New Hampshire line. Worked on bikes, raised his own vegetables. Stanley used to say he was a pioneer, born in the wrong century.”

“You’ve got a better memory than I do,” I told him.

“It’s what Stanley said that brought it back.”

“Which?” I asked him.

“Creek Fortier cultivated bees,” Tony said.

I called Andy Ravenant’s office with a couple of questions, but Andy wasn’t there and Max Quinn hadn’t clocked in at all. I wanted to talk to Max, not least to thank him, although I wanted my ducks in a row first because I wasn’t certain just where he stood. Then the receptionist put me on hold, and when the phone was picked up again, it was Kitty Dwyer on the line.

“How’d you make out?” she asked me.

I didn’t know that I was any more ready to talk to Kitty than Max, but you can’t script every encounter. “Well, there’s good news and bad news,” I told her, shifting mental gears. “I got my tail caught in a crack but maybe I pushed some buttons. I don’t know for sure. Max bailed me out of a jam anyway.”

“Max? How so?”

“One of those things,” I said. “You needed to be there.”

“You mean more background than you want to go into over the phone?”

“I mean I’m not ready to confide in you, frankly,” I said.

“Meet you for a drink after work?”

I hesitated and then took the plunge. “Sure,” I said.

“Sun’s already past the yard-arm,” Kitty said.

That was true. I hadn’t gotten back to town until three in the afternoon. “I think I take your meaning,” I told her.

“Let’s close up shop, then,” she said.

We met at a bar in the financial district, busy enough with suits stopping on their way home that we didn’t attract any attention and just loud enough for personal conversations not to be overheard. It was a good choice. Too many people think a meeting should be held in a deserted place; it’s actually the reverse. Kitty knew a crowd gave better cover, and the ambient noise made a wire unreliable.

“So?” she asked as we put our drinks on a corner table.

I shrugged. “You guys gave me the bait, and I took it,” I said. “I don’t know how deep Ravenant and Dwyer is in, but you’re in deep enough to be worried about it.”

She didn’t fence. “I don’t want to be disbarred,” she told me, “but I don’t want to put Andy in the hot seat.”

“Is it that narrow a choice?”

“Most of our choices come down to self-interest,” she said.

“That’s open to definition,” I said. “What about Max?”

“What about him?”

“How’d you recruit his services, for openers?”

“He came to us from the states. Max had good connections.”

“Inside, you mean.”

“He’s got a lot of markers to call in.”

“Cops and private dicks don’t get on that well as a rule,” I said. “Then again, a lot of private dicks used to be cops.”

“The old blue network,” she said.

“Did he leave the state police under a cloud?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Kitty,” I said. “Did he take early retirement? Was he being investigated by Internal Affairs? Did he cut corners? What?”

She rolled her eyes. “Max is sui generis,” she said. “He worked a lot of undercover, drug stings, bribery, payoffs, you name it. He made enemies. But he made good busts, arrests that stuck. Andy was a PD, remember, but he respected Max.”

I understood what she meant. A public defender would smell out a dirty cop. “Andy knew Max from before?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she said.

I was trying to make something compute and couldn’t do the math.

“What exactly is bothering you, Jack?” Kitty asked.

“Max steered me in the direction of the bikers, and then he was there to save my bacon when I ran into grief.”

She didn’t wonder what kind of grief I’d run into. “What’s the problem with that?” she asked. “He’s using you as a blind? We’re defending a couple of kids on a trafficking rap. If we can make a case for intimidation, witness tampering, the whole nine yards, maybe we can buy them a little less time. Max Quinn is just doing his job.”

“Who are you trying to convince?” I asked her. “This isn’t a summation in front of a jury.”

She hadn’t touched her drink. She fiddled with the stem of her glass.

“I don’t feature it, either,” she admitted.

“What’s his game, then?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Jack, stop jerking me around,” she said, fiercely. “You know goddamn well what he’s up to, and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass if he takes us down, too.”

I was startled by her vehemence and realized there were tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. I didn’t think she was acting, either.

She swallowed, gulping down her sorrow. “Max is using you} How do you think I feel?” she demanded.

Probably like crap, I thought. “Confused,” I said.

“You are not a lot of help.” Kitty said, scrubbing her eyes angrily on her sleeve.

Up until then I hadn’t wanted to be.

“This isn’t going the way I’d hoped,” she muttered.

“Me, either,” I told her.

“Well, that’s a small relief,” she said.

I didn’t know what to make of that remark.

“You want me to put it into words, don’t you? Okay,” she said. “You think Max Quinn is using his job at Ravenant and Dwyer as leverage. So do I. He’s collecting proprietary client information to make a case against Chip McGill for the states. It’ll never stand up in court, if it comes out, because the evidence would be tainted and none of it admissible, but he can set them up, all of them, McGill and the bikers, and the state police can tell a judge we have a confidential source, somebody inside, and the judge will go along with it.”

“But how much does Max know?”

“Not enough, obviously. That’s where you come in.”

“Working under attorney privilege for Ravenant and Dwyer.”

“Which could put me and Andy both in the toilet.”

I saw that. How could you claim to be oblivious? You were either unscrupulous or incompetent.

Kitty sighed. “This is a no-win situation,” she said.

“Looks that way,” I said. “Max is working from a stacked deck. But even if all of this is true, what’s his handle on Andy? Or are you saying that Andy could have been in on it from the get-go, that he’s a party to it?”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Don’t believe it or can’t bring yourself to?”

She gave that a moment’s thought. “No, it’s not wishful thinking,” she said finally. “I don’t believe it because it’s not in Andy’s character. It runs counter to what he believes in. The practice of law may he adversarial, but you hope it all balances out, on average.”

“Okay,” I said.

I must have sounded unconvinced. “Jack,” she explained, “Andy Ravenant is a straight arrow. Not a Boy Scout, but a guy who honors the law, even if it’s an imperfect instrument. And that’s as much a weakness as it is a strength in this trade. The point is, he wouldn’t countenance unlawful means even if they led to a desirable end.”

“Okay,” I said again, smiling this time. “Let’s make sure we’re reading off the same page, here. We both figure Max Quinn sees Chip McGill as a target of opportunity, and helping Major Crimes take him out would put Max in solid with the AG’s office and the old blues. The fact that you guys are defending a couple of kids who might be persuaded to rat McGill out gives Max an angle, and the fact that Andy’s grandfather is involved makes for a strong pressure point, although you don’t think Andy will fold.”

“I know so,” Kitty said.

I didn’t have quite her confidence, but I let it go. “Does Andy have power of attorney for his grandfather?” I asked her.

“I couldn’t tell you even if I knew,” she said. “Why?”

“Stanley’s in intensive care,” I told her. “He might be on his way to the back exit.”

“Oh my God,” she said, shocked. “That’s why Andy isn’t at the office. He should have said something.”

It occurred to me why he hadn’t, and Kitty worked it out in the next heartbeat.

“He didn’t want Max to know,” she said, staring up at me.

I was already standing, fishing for my wallet. I dropped a ten on the table and put my glass on top of it.

Kitty was right behind me as I made for the door. “What is it?” she demanded, catching up with me on the sidewalk.

“I don’t think Andy’s at the hospital with Stanley,” I told her. “You have a cell phone?”

She pulled it out of her handbag as we hoofed it down the block to my car. I unlocked the passenger door, and Kitty climbed in, reaching across the seat to unlock the driver’s door as I limped around.

“I don’t know the number,” I said as I got behind the wheel. “It’s a listing in Ayer. See if you can get through to Admitting.”

Kitty was already punching up directory assistance.

I pulled out into the traffic, headed for the expressway. It was the wrong time of day and we’d be fighting rush-hour on the Mystic Bridge approaches, but I figured the McGrath & O’Brien was our best bet to get to Route 2. It was the same road I’d traveled that morning with Tony.

“You want to know whether Andy’s there?” she asked me.

“No harm in asking,” I said, jumping an intersection, “but I want to find out where the EMTs picked Stanley up. If you can get directions, that’s a plus.”

The Central Artery was gridlocked. I inched along until I could take the Storrow Drive exit.

“Stanley’s only visitor is his wife,” Kitty told me, her hand over the phone for a second. I heard her tell the nurse on duty she was an insurance adjuster looking for time and mileage on the emergency call. “Right,” she said, listening, and noting it all down on a legal pad. She disconnected with a thank you.

Traffic along the river was moving faster. I could pick up Route 2 in Cambridge.

“Pepperell,” Kitty said. That’s where Stanley was picked up. “Volunteer fire department, ambulance on call. I’ve already got the number; you want me to give it a shot?”

I should have known Stanley wasn’t just joyriding. He’d been on his way to see the beekeeper.

“Try my brother first,” I said. I gave her Tony’s number.

She started to explain who she was when he answered; I interrupted impatiently. “Ask him how the hell we’re going to find Creek Fortier,” I said. “Tell him I screwed up, and we’re behind the clock.”

“He heard you,” Kitty told me, listening to Tony. Then she laughed. “You got that right,” she said into the phone.

We were past the Magazine Street railroad trestle, closing on Soldiers Field Road and the Eliot Bridge. I was shifting back and forth between lanes, picking every gap I could, leaving some exasperated commuters behind me, giving me the finger.

“He’ll have it for us,” Kitty said, speaking to me with exaggerated calm as if she were talking a kitten off a ledge. “Tony wants to know how soon you think we’re going to get there if we survive the ride?”

“Forty-five minutes, an hour, if we’re lucky.” I let my foot off the gas incrementally. “Make that an hour and a half.” It was sort of an apology to Kitty for being so abrupt.

“Okay,” she said to Tony and flipped the cell phone closed. “He says to be cool, Jack.”

“I’m working on it,” I said, but I was stirred with unease and a sense of urgency.

My brother used a livery service out of Lexington on a regular basis. They had handicapped-accessible vans, and a fleet of cabs to cover the suburban area beyond Route 128, and they bid on school bus contracts, filling in between assigned stops. If you were too far off the beaten track or had a special-needs child who wasn’t being mainstreamed, Tony’s taxi guys would carpool you, mileage paid by the state. Their dispatchers knew every secondary road in Middlesex County, including this poverty pocket outside the 495 loop. Tony was passing us directions.

“Stanley’s been helping Creek Fortier out ever since Vietnam,” I explained to Kitty. “He’s lent him money he never expected to be paid back, given him tools, kept him afloat. I don’t mean Fortier’s a user, but Stanley was a soft touch because Creek was a link to his dead son, something Stanley wouldn’t want to let go of. My guess is that Stanley cosigned a mortgage for this property Creek’s got, and when Creek didn’t keep up the payments, Stanley took title or something like that. Creek’s on the dim side, I hear. Or not of this world, anyway, which Stanley wouldn’t take as a handicap. And he wouldn’t want to see Creek lose the place. He must have told Andy to make sure the land got transferred to Creek’s name, but he didn’t tell Andy the punchline, which is that he was dying. Andy got curious.”

I glanced over at her. “I guess that’s an occupational hazard. Besides, you don’t want to see your grandfather make foolish moves when he’s getting along in years. That’s why Chip McGill put the heat under Stanley. He thought Andy was trying to roust him because, like any paranoid, he made it for a conspiracy.”

“When all it is is miscommunication,” Kitty suggested.

“All it is is Stanley trying to protect this guy.”

“From the rigors of the modern age,” she said.

“Yeah, well, my guess is that Creek Fortier has been lured into the modern age in a big way,” I said. “I think it’s the biker connection. Creek builds custom bikes. So long as people leave him alone to raise bees and build bikes, he’s got no kick with the twenty-first century. Stanley insulated him, but with Stanley gone he’d be on his own. If he didn’t think about it, somebody might have suggested it to him.”

She was ahead of me. “Chip McGill,” she said.

I stood on the gas to get around a pickup loaded with drywall. Kitty dug her feet into the floorboards as we swerved back into our own lane. “Creek was in the biker loop,” I told her. “I don’t mean he’s a card-carrying member of an outlaw club, but gear-heads know about each other. It’s word of mouth. So a Disciple comes by to talk bikes, and they hit it off. The guy sees an opportunity. Here’s a reclusive motorcycle freak living out in the sticks, no near neighbors. Kind of a Luddite even, except when it comes to tuning bike engines.”

“Which is what? Basically his only real social skill?”

“Exactly. And the Disciples persuade him his interests lie in diversification, expanding his horizons.”

“Including?”

“Better living through chemistry,” I said.

Her cell phone beeped. It was Tony. I’d slowed down coming into Groton. Kitty, the phone to her ear, pointed me up a back road north that led along the Nashua River, a tributary of the Merrimack. The narrow blacktop followed the contours of the hillsides that supplied the watershed and crossed the river on a covered bridge, coming into the foot of the village.

Pepperell is another one of those settlements that time forgot after the mills closed. It was as if the waters of a great flood had lapped at its doorstep and then left it high and dry. It was a dry town, literally. You couldn’t buy liquor there.

“Got it,” Kitty said into the phone. She glanced at me. “We go through town past the elementary school and take a right-hand fork at the Congregational Church,” she said.

I followed her instructions.

“Bald Hill Road,” Kitty said. “Okay.” She turned in her seat. “He’s starting to break up,” she told me. “We’re getting out of range.”

Cell coverage overlapped, but we were in a blind spot.

“I’m losing you,” Kitty said-to Tony. “Say again.” She listened, had him repeat it a third time, and then broke the connection. “We look for a side road up here on the left,” she said to me. “Unpaved but graded. There should be horse barns and a riding ring maybe half a mile in. A mile or so past that, there’ll be a split-rail fence and a dirt driveway and kind of a shed. I didn’t quite get that, but it’s the best I could do.”

We took the turn we thought we were supposed to, and half a mile in we passed the horse barns. There was nobody there. After a mile point two by the odometer there was a little lean-to up against a split-rail fence. Inside the lean-to was a shelf with jars of honey for sale and a coffee can where you left the money on the honor system. The property was heavily wooded, and we couldn’t see a house from the road. I drove past slowly and pulled up a hundred yards farther along.

“You thinking to go in on foot?” Kitty asked me.

“That’s the plan,” I said.

“And this is where you tell me to wait here, right? With a cell phone that doesn’t work and no idea what’s going on.”

I’d already had second thoughts about bringing Kitty along, but she was right. “You weird with guns?” I asked her.

“No more than the next girl.”

I took out the Smith, checked the magazine, and tucked it away in the small of my back. I reached under the seat and got the compact nine out of its spring clip. I worked the slide, safed it, and held it out to Kitty. “Point it, snap the safety off, squeeze the trigger,” I said, showing her what I was talking about. “Don’t use it unless they get close and you can hit them square in the upper body, no chance of a miss.”

She nodded and took the gun. “Combat nine millimeter, double-action-only, pre-Brady double-stack, thirteen rounds. I’ve got a concealed carry permit, Jack,” she said. “My mistake, I left my own gun in my other pants.”

I was going to remark that she wasn’t wearing pants, she had on a navy jacket and a skirt that showed off her legs, but I figured I’d embarrassed myself enough already. She tucked the nine in the waistband of her skirt, under her jacket and behind her back, the same as I had. “What are we likely to run in to?” she asked me.

“Maybe just an emotionally disabled vet,” I said. “Maybe your partner come to warn him—” I held up my hand when Kitty started to protest. “Or come to explain things to him,” I went on. “Or we could be about to step into the deep end of the pool, and land in the heavy. Are you ready for that?”

“No,” she said.

I sighed. “Neither am I,” I told her.

“Might as well get to it, then,” Kitty said. “It won’t get any easier if we wait.”

We stepped out of the car into the lingering late-afternoon light. The hum of insects buzzed in the grass, and birdsong sounded in the near distance. We walked back to Creek Fortier’s drive and started up it. The maples had turned, their leaves scarlet and bronze, the poplars lemon yellow, the birches dusty gold. It was quiet under the trees. The leaves smelled dry and spicy.

The road opened out into a meadow, and we stopped at the edge of the trees. There was a small clapboard farmhouse, and a shop building in back. Beyond the buildings was an apple orchard, untended but with beehives spaced between the trees, square boxes up on platforms, the orchard left for the bees, not for the apples. Fallen fruit lay on the ground, fermenting.

“Do bees hibernate?” Kitty asked.

“I think they go dormant in the winter, if they don’t die,” I said. “Maybe you have to take them in, like tomato plants or geraniums.”

“You’re full of vegetable lore,” she remarked, smiling.

I was looking at the open ground we had to cover. We’d be exposed to the house if anyone was watching for us. There were a couple of big bikes out back by the shop, and three cars — a GTO, vintage muscle; a ’53 Ford clunker; and a new Audi. “That’s his car, the Audi,” Kitty said.

“Andy’s?”

She nodded.

I blew out my breath, trying to think.

“Suggestion?” Kitty asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“What’s to keep me from simply going over there?”

“And your story’s what?”

She shrugged. “I’m just some yuppie twit from Boston,” she said. “A leafpeeper looking for local color.”

“Andy won’t give you away, you walk in on them?”

“Andy’s a trial lawyer, and a good one,” she said. “He can improvise.”

I didn’t have anything better.

“You flank the house,” Kitty said, and off she went.

Flank? I thought. She sounded like a platoon sergeant. I let her get out in the open where she could be seen and worked my way around the meadow, keeping under cover of the trees.

Kitty was halfway to the house, and then she paused for a second, leaning down to straighten her heel or pick a stone out of her shoe. She didn’t look in my direction.

I froze where I was, wondering if she was trying to send me a signal, but I didn’t see that anything had changed. The place was completely still except for a few late-season cicadas sawing in the tall grass, and the air felt hot and somnolent.

Kitty went on up the drive, approaching the house without any obvious apprehension, like somebody who’d run out of gas and needed to use the phone.

I’d stopped circling, watching her.

She went up onto the small porch and peered in the windows, and then she went around back toward the shop.

I waited to see if something happened, but nothing did.

Kitty came back out front and made a shrugging gesture, her hands out at her sides. I hobbled across the grass, favoring my bad leg. “Nobody home, tiddley-pum,” she said.

The sun was just below the tree line, the light taking on a metallic quality, sharp and coppery. A slight breeze lifted the leaves of the maples. There was the scent of water, a stream or a spring nearby, and something else, not acrid but steely, like a whiff of ammonia.

“What is that?” Kitty asked, sniffing the wind. “It smells like nail polish remover.”

“Acetone,” I said. It was very faint, though. From what Frank Dugan had told me about cooking meth. I’d expected more of a piercing odor.

“They’re here, then,” she said.

Did she still think Andy was an innocent bystander in this?

I didn’t ask her out loud.

We went through the orchard, moving carefully.

“Are bees territorial?” she asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Social insects, mated to their hives. They kill intruders, but beekeepers work around them all the time and don’t get stung.”

I wished I knew what I was talking about. The bees were everywhere under the apple trees, but they seemed sleepy, headed home with dusk. You could brush them aside gently, and they’d go on about their business. We were no more than objects in the way, and they went around. There was nothing angry about them.

“Jack,” Kitty said, stopping short.

A few trees off the path a bunch of bees were swarming, confused and without any apparent purpose, rising in a cloud and then settling again, like moths. It was uncharacteristic.

I ducked under the branches and went closer. The bees were agitated and uncertain. I didn’t want them any more worked up.

He lay his length on the ground, staring at the sky. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years, but I knew it was Creek Fortier. The bees kept lighting on him, almost plucking at his hair, his clothes. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t credit them with a dog’s intelligence or loyalty, but there it was. They seemed to be trying to coax him up. With the back of his head blown off, I didn’t think he’d rise to the occasion.

I backed away. “We got big trouble,” I murmured to Kitty.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“It’s not Andy, it’s Creek,” I told her.

She looked relieved.

“We should go to the car, and to town, and get some backup,” I said.

“Not if Andy’s down there,” she said.

“We’re in over our heads,” I said.

“You, maybe,” Kitty said, turning away.

Below the orchard the ground sloped off to a brook overhung with poplar and birch. We moved into a stand of trees to our left and worked our way down to the water. From there we made our way downstream, using what cover we could, and found what we were looking for.

“Like a moonshiner’s,” Kitty whispered to me.

It was a small shed built on a platform over the brook with outside ductwork to a hood on the roof and a tangle of copper piping that went under the surface of the water. It was a distillery, in effect, to condense and filter the residue, disguising the smell. Creek’s work, I figured.

“A peculiar genius,” Kitty remarked.

I nodded. “But why did they kill him?” I asked.

“They’re closing down,” she said.

Which made sense if the operation was compromised, but how sure of that were they?

We made our approach to the shed incrementally, move and then crouch, move and crouch, trying to make as little noise as possible. The running water chuckled in the stream bed loudly enough that we weren’t heard. When we got next to the little outbuilding, we hunkered down outside the windowless plywood sheathing. Nobody had raised an alarm.

Whoever was inside wasn’t listening for trespassers. They were too intent on something else. There was an indistinct murmur of voices and then an involuntary whimper and ragged, heavy breathing. What it sounded like was an interrogation, and a painful one.

Kitty and I probably had the same thought at the same time: Andy was being tortured.

We ducked around the corner of the shed and took up our positions on either side of the plank door, both of us with guns up, cocked and locked, fingers alongside the trigger guards. There was another sharp whimper of pain.

I nodded to Kitty, stepped back, and kicked the door open. We were inside before anybody had time to react.

Everything stopped for maybe a long three count, all of us taken by surprise.

Three guys, one tied in a chair. The guy in the chair was battered and bruised, but it wasn’t Andy. It was the redheaded biker from Charlestown. Andy was standing behind him with a pair of bloody pliers in his hand. The third guy was in front of the chair, caught in a half crouch, looking over his shoulder at us. I knew he was Chip McGill.

Sometimes things slow down, like it’s happening under water, but this was sudden and abrupt. McGill snapped out of his crouch, coming up with a stainless autoloader in his right hand. It was incredibly stupid of him, and he made the same mistake I’d made in back of the Blue Mirror, not watching the girl. Kitty shot him twice in the chest with the nine, punching two holes in him you could have covered with a quarter. He was dead when he hit the floor.

Andy jumped back, and Kitty shifted her aim. I thought for a second she was going to shoot Andy, too.

“Oh God, Kitty,” Andy bleated, dropping the pliers. “Look what he made me do.”

Kitty wasn’t having any. “Shut up,” she said tiredly. “Don’t give me any more reason to hate your guts.” But at least she lowered the gun.

They’d wired Red’s wrists together behind his back, and I had to use the pliers to get it off. I tried not to think about what else they’d been used for. “DEA,” he croaked, rubbing his hands together to bring back the circulation. “Working undercover with the state police.”

Well, at least he’d gotten my gun away from the speed freak before she killed me with it, I remembered.

We started back up toward the house. Red needed my help, which I didn’t wonder at. He was in bad shape. Kitty seemed to have gone numb, too, which I didn’t wonder at, either. It was a delayed reaction from shooting McGill. You don’t shake it off that easily.

We were still below the orchard when Andy took it into his head to make a run for it. He just suddenly bolted, pumping his legs through the tall grass, plowing uphill. None of us had the energy to chase him, and there wasn’t much point in shooting him. How far was he going to get, after all? Maybe he thought he could outrun his disgrace, his life in a shambles.

“Andy,” Kitty called after him wearily.

But he didn’t look back. He charged recklessly through the orchard, flailing at the aroused bees.

“Oh Jesus,” Kitty whispered.

I didn’t quite get what was happening. I saw Andy stumble and find his feet and then stumble again and go down.

Kitty had stopped where she stood, stricken.

Andy managed to stand again, his angry shouts turning into a terrified wail. The air around him was thick with insects, and bees had settled on him like a carpet, so many they obscured his shape. He fell a last time and didn’t get up.

The clamor of bees subsided in the gathering twilight, and the light breeze rustled through the maples.

We made a wide circle around the orchard, not speaking. If any of us had thoughts, we kept them to ourselves.

Stanley died two days later. He’d gone into a coma and hadn’t come out of it. Maybe it was for the best, since he didn’t have to learn about his grandson.

Andy had cut himself in on McGill’s racket early when Creek Fortier had come to ask his advice, not daring to bring it up with Stanley. I’d guessed right about that part at least.

Stanley had held the paper on Creek’s land, intending to put it in trust with Andy as trustee. The part I’d guessed wrong about was why Chip McGill had gone after Stanley. It was insurance, plain and simple, in case Andy got cold feet. McGill thought like a thug, which he was. What nobody figured out until afterward was that Andy had already decided he’d throw McGill over the side. If the Disciples thought McGill were a liability, they’d take him out for their own protection. Andy just needed a credible story, one that would sell on the street, and he had it in the case he was preparing, the townies who had bought product from McGill. If word got out they were going to plead down in exchange for giving him up, he was dead meat. His big name in the neighborhoods wouldn’t buy him a pass.

Why had Andy gone bad? Maybe somebody had finally met his price, but that doesn’t really explain it. Kitty Dwyer believed in him right up until she saw him with the pliers in his hand.

And that’s where my own thinking led me. Andy had gotten tired of living up to other people’s expectations. He stepped over the line because the line was there. They say in the trade that the dealer always gives you the first taste for free.

Then there was Max Quinn.

I knew that Kitty had terminated his contract with Ravenant & Dwyer, and by an unhappy coincidence I met him a couple of days later, lugging his files out of the office. I was there to take Kitty to lunch.

Max put the box he was carrying down on the tailgate of a station wagon parked in the loading zone and looked me over with bland venom. “You queered me good, pal,” he said, smiling.

The smile was for show. “Not my intention,” I said.

“Well, the good Lord save us from honest intentions,” Max said. He leaned back and rested his elbows on the carton. “You ever stop to think I had those vermin in the palm of my hand and I was ready to close my fist? I coulda had every one of the bastards, and what do you have to show for it? Chip McGill on a slab and a dead lawyer.” He shrugged. “ ’Course, I guess a dead lawyer ain’t the worst thing. You take the bitter with the sweet.” He smiled that crocodile smile again.

“I’m not arguing,” I said. “But our interests weren’t the same. You were looking for it to go your way. My client wanted a different outcome.”

He snorted. “Your client,” he said. “Jesus, you take the prize. Your client is dead, for Christ’s sake. He had one foot in the grave when he hired you. You should of showed me some professional courtesy, for openers. Not to mention that I saved your ass from a whipping.”

“I wasn’t forgetting,” I said.

“Me, either,” Max said.

“You had a personal axe to grind,” I told him, “and you were looking to buy chips so you could get back in the game.”

“Is that what you think?” Max shook his head. “You stupid s.o.b.”

“Don’t push it,” I said.

“I have an axe to grind, yeah,” he said hoarsely. “You want to know what it is? My daughter Olivia died on speed. She took a hotshot. And those bikers are out there peddling methedrine cut with rat poison. You’d better goddamn know I’ve got an axe to grind.”

“You were on the task force, state police, and DEA,” I said, finally seeing the forest for the trees.

“Now we’re playing catchup hall.”

There was nothing I could say. I tried anyway. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I said.

“Sorry don’t do the trick, pal,” he said, and turned away.

I remembered what Stanley had said about flying over the Adriatic during bombing runs. It had looked so beautiful, like a blue mirror, but was hard as cement if you hit it going down. It was an appropriate metaphor.

Enemies are like that.

Max could smile his crocodile smile and pretend to carry on a civil conversation with me, like bygones were bygones, but he’d be looking for a chance to drop me in a hole, the deeper the better. It was a brute fact like the bright blue ocean below, unyielding as stone. I’d done Max an injury, and it didn’t matter that it was an honest mistake. He wasn’t going to give me room to make another.