The Whisperers

1

Summer had come, the season of awakenings.

This state, this northern place, was not like its southern kin. Here, spring was an illusion, a promise made yet always unkept, a pretence of new life bound by blackened snow and slow-melting ice. Nature had learned to bide its time by the beaches and the bogs, in the Great North Woods of the County and the salt marshes of Scarborough. Let winter hold sway in February and March, beating its slow retreat to the forty-ninth parallel, refusing to concede even an inch of ground without a fight. As April approached, the willows and poplars, the hazel and the elms, had budded amid birdsong. They had been waiting since the fall, their flowers shrouded yet ready, and soon the bogs were carpeted in the purple-brown of alders; chipmunks and beavers were on the move. The skies bloomed with woodcock, and geese, and grackle, scattering themselves like seeds upon fields of blue.

Now May had brought summer at last, and all things were awake.

All things.

Sunlight splashed itself upon the window, warming my back with its heat, and fresh coffee was poured into my cup.

‘A bad business,’ said Kyle Quinn. Kyle, a neat, compact man in pristine whites, was the owner of the Palace Diner in Biddeford. He was also the chef, and he happened to be the cleanest diner chef I’d ever seen in my life. I’d eaten in diners where the eventual sight of the chef had made me consider undertaking a course of antibiotics, but Kyle was so nicely turned out, and his kitchen so spotless, that there were ICUs with poorer hygiene than the Palace, and surgeons with dirtier hands than Kyle’s.

The Palace was the oldest diner car in Maine, custom-built by the Pollard Company of Lowell, Massachusetts, its red and white paintwork still fresh and spruce, and the gold lettering on the window that confirmed ladies were, indeed, invited glowed brightly as if written in fire. The diner had opened for business in 1927, and since then five people had owned it, of whom Kyle was the latest. It served only breakfast, and closed before midday, and was one of those small treasures that made daily life a little more bearable.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Bad in the worst way.’

The Portland Press-Herald was spread before me over the counter of the diner. At the bottom of the front page, beneath the fold, the headline read:

NO LEADS IN SLAYING OF STATE TROOPER

The trooper in question, Foster Jandreau, had been found shot to death in his truck behind the former Blue Moon bar just inside the Saco town line. He hadn’t been on duty at the time, and was dressed in civilian clothes when his body was discovered. What he was doing at the Blue Moon, nobody knew, especially since the autopsy revealed that he’d been killed sometime after midnight but before 2 a.m, when nobody had any business hanging around the burnt-out shell of an unloved bar. Jandreau’s remains were found by a road crew that had pulled into the Moon’s parking lot for some coffee and an early morning smoke before commencing the day’s work. He had been shot twice at close range with a.22, once in the heart and once in the head. It bore all of the hallmarks of an execution.

‘That place was always a magnet for trouble,’ said Kyle. ‘They should have just razed what was left of it after it burnt.’

‘Yeah, but what would they have put there instead?’

‘A tombstone,’ said Kyle. ‘A tombstone with Sally Cleaver’s name on it.’

He walked away to pour coffee for the rest of the stragglers, most of whom were reading or talking quietly among themselves, seated in a line like characters in a Norman Rockwell painting. There were no booths at the Palace, and no tables, just fifteen stools. I occupied the last stool, the one farthest from the door. It was after 11:00 a.m, and technically the diner was now closed, but Kyle wouldn’t be moving folk along anytime soon. It was that kind of place.

Sally Cleaver: her name had been mentioned in the reporting of Jandreau’s murder, a little piece of local history that most people might have preferred to forget, and the final nail in the Blue Moon’s coffin, as it were. After her death, the bar was boarded up, and a couple of months later it was torched. The owner was questioned about possible arson and insurance fraud, but it was just a matter of routine. The birds in the trees knew that the Cleaver family had put the match to the Blue Moon bar, and nobody uttered a word of blame for it.

The bar had now been closed for nearly a decade, a cause of grief for precisely no one, not even the rummies who used to frequent it. Locals always referred to it as the Blue Mood, as nobody ever came out of it feeling better than they had when they went in, even if they hadn’t eaten the food or drunk anything that they hadn’t seen unsealed in front of them. It was a grim place, a brick fortress topped with a painted sign illuminated by four bulbs, no more than three of which were ever working at any one time. Inside, the lights were kept dim to hide the filth, and all of the stools at the bar were screwed to the floor to provide some stability for the drunks. It had a menu right out of the chronic obesity school of cooking, but most of its clientele preferred to fill themselves up on the free beer nuts, salted to within an inch of a stroke in order to encourage the consumption of alcohol. At the end of the evening, the uneaten but heavily pawed nuts that remained were poured back into the big sack that Earle Hanley, the bartender, kept beside the sink. Earle was the only bartender. If he was sick, or had something else more important to do than pickle drunks, the Blue Moon didn’t open. Sometimes, if you watched the clientele arriving for their daily fill, it was hard to tell if they were relieved or unhappy to find the door occasionally bolted.

And then Sally Cleaver died, and the Moon died with her.

There was no mystery about her death. She was twenty-three, and living with a deadbeat named Clifton Andreas, ‘Cliffie’ to his buddies. It seemed that Sally had been putting a little money aside each week from her job as a waitress, perhaps in the hope of saving enough to have Cliffie Andreas killed, or to convince Earle Hanley to spike his beer nuts with rat poison. I was familiar with Cliffie Andreas as a face around town, one that it was sensible to avoid. Cliffie Andreas never met a puppy that he didn’t want to drown, or a bug that he didn’t want to crush. Any work that he picked up was seasonal, but Cliffie was never likely to qualify for employee of the month. Work was something that he did when there was no money left, and he viewed it entirely as a last resort if borrowing, theft, or simply leeching off someone weaker and more needy than himself weren’t available options. He had a superficial bad boy charm for the kind of woman who assumed a public pose of regarding good men as weak, even as she secretly dreamed of a regular Joe who wasn’t mired in the mud at the bottom of the pond and determined to drag someone else down there with him.

I didn’t know Sally Cleaver. Apparently she had low self-esteem, and lower expectations, but somehow Cliffie Andreas succeeded in reducing the former still further, and failed to live up even to the latter. Anyway, one evening Cliffie found Sally’s small, hard-earned stash, and decided to treat himself and his buddies to a free night at the Moon. Sally came home from work, found her money gone, and went looking for Cliffie at his favorite haunt. She found him holding court at the bar, drinking on her dime the Moon’s only bottle of cognac, and she decided to stand up for herself for the first, and last, time in her life. She screamed at him, scratched him, tore at his hair, until at last Earle Hanley told Cliffie to take his woman, and his domestic problems, outside, and not to come back until he had both under control.

So Cliffie Andreas had grabbed Sally Cleaver by the collar and pulled her through the back door, and the men at the bar had listened while he pounded her into the ground. When he came back inside, his knuckles were raw, his hands were stained red, and his face was flecked with freckles of blood. Earle Hanley poured him another drink and slipped outside to check on Sally Cleaver. By then, she was already choking on her own blood, and she died on the back lot before the ambulance could get to her.

And that was it for the Blue Moon, and for Cliffie Andreas. He pulled ten to fifteen in Thomaston, served eight, then was killed less than two months after his release by an ‘unknown assailant’ who stole Cliffie’s watch, left his wallet untouched, then discarded the watch in a nearby ditch. It was whispered that the Cleavers had long memories.

Now Foster Jandreau had died barely yards from the spot on which Sally Cleaver had choked to death, and the ashes of the Moon’s history were being raked through once again. Meanwhile, the state police didn’t like losing troopers, hadn’t liked it since right back in 1924 when Emery Gooch was killed in a motorcycle accident in Mattawamkeag; nor since 1964, when Charlie Black became the first trooper killed by gunfire while responding to a bank raid in South Berwick. But there were shadows around Jandreau’s killing. The paper might have claimed that there were no leads, but the rumors said otherwise. Crack vials had been found on the ground by Jandreau’s car, and fragments of the same glass were discovered on the floor by his feet. He had no drugs in his system, but there were now concerns on the force that Foster Jandreau might have been dealing on the side, and that would be bad for everyone.

Slowly, the diner began to empty, but I stayed where I was until I was the only one remaining at the counter. Kyle left me to myself, making sure that my cup was full before he started cleaning up. The last of the regulars, mostly older men for whom the week wasn’t the same without a couple of visits to the Palace, paid their checks and left.

I’ve never had an office. I never had any use for one, and if I had, I probably couldn’t have justified the expense of it to myself, even given a favorable rent in Portland or Scarborough. Only a handful of clients had ever commented upon it, and on those occasions when a particular need for privacy and discretion had arisen, I’d been in a position to call in favors, and a suitable room had been provided. Occasionally I used the offices of my attorney up in Freeport, but there were people who disliked the idea of going into a lawyer’s office almost as much as they disliked the idea of lawyers in general, and I’d found that most of those who came to me for help preferred a more informal approach. Usually I went to them, and spoke with them in their own homes, but sometimes a diner like the Palace, empty and discreet, was as good as anywhere. In this case, the venue for the meeting had been decided by the prospective client, not by me, and I was fine with it.

Shortly after midday, the Palace’s door opened, and a man in his late sixties entered. He looked like a model for the stereotypical old Yankee: feed cap on his head, an L.L. Bean jacket over a plaid shirt, neat blue denims, and work boots on his feet. He was wiry as a tension cable, his face weathered and lined, light brown eyes glittering behind surprisingly fashionable steel-framed spectacles. He greeted Kyle by name, then removed his hat and gave a courtly little bow to Tara, Kyle’s daughter, who was cleaning up behind the counter and who smiled and greeted him in turn.

‘Good to see you, Mr. Patchett,’ she said. ‘It’s been a while.’ There was a tenderness to her voice, and a brightness to her eyes, that said all that needed to be said about the new arrival’s recent sufferings.

Kyle leaned through the serving hatch between the kitchen and the counter area. ‘Come to check out a real diner, Bennett?’ he said. ‘You look like you could do with some feeding up.’

Bennett Patchett chuckled and swatted at the air with his right hand, as though Kyle’s words were insects buzzing at his head, then took a seat beside me. Patchett had owned the Downs Diner, close to the Scarborough Downs racetrack on Route 1, for more than forty years. His father had run it before him, opening it shortly after he returned from service in Europe. There were still pictures of Patchett Senior on the walls of the diner, some of them from his military days, surrounded by younger men who looked up to him as their sergeant. He’d died when he was still in his forties, and his son had eventually taken over the running of the business. Bennett had now lived longer than his own father, just as it seemed that I was destined to live longer than mine.

He accepted the offer of a cup of coffee from Tara as he shrugged off his coat and hung it close to the old gas fire. Tara discreetly went to help her father in the kitchen, so that Bennett and I were left alone.

‘Charlie,’ he said, shaking my hand.

‘How you doing, Mr. Patchett?’ I asked. It felt odd to be calling him by his last name. It made me feel about ten years old, but when it came to such men, you waited until they gave you permission to be a little more familiar in your mode of address. I knew that all of his staff called him ‘Mr. Patchett.’ He might have been like a father figure to some of them, but he was their boss, and they treated him with the respect that he deserved.

‘You can call me Bennett, son. The less formal this is, the better. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with a private detective before, except you, and that was only when you were eating in my place. Only ever saw them on TV and in the movies. And, truth to tell, your reputation makes me a little nervous.’

He peered at me, and I saw his eye linger briefly at the scar on my neck. A bullet had grazed me there the previous year, deep enough to leave a permanent mark. In recent times, I seemed to have accumulated a lot of similar nicks and scratches. When I died, they could put me in a display case as an example to others who might be tempted to follow a similar path of beatings, gunshot wounds, and electrocution. Then again, I might just have been unlucky. Or lucky. It depended upon how you looked at the glass.

‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ I said.

‘I don’t, and you still concern me.’

I shrugged. He had a sly smile on his face.

‘But no point in hemmin’ and hawin’,’ he continued. ‘I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I know that you’re probably a busy man.’

I wasn’t, but it was nice of him to suggest that I might be. Since my license had been restored to me earlier in the year, following some misunderstandings with the Maine State Police, things had been kind of quiet. I’d done a little insurance work, all of it dull and most of it involving nothing more strenuous than sitting in a car and turning the pages of a book while I waited for some doofus with alleged workplace injuries to start lifting heavy stones in his yard. But insurance work was thin on the ground, what with the economy being the way it was. Most private detectives in the state were struggling, and I had been forced to accept any work that came along, including the kind that made me want to bathe in bleach when I was done. I’d followed a man named Harry Milner while he serviced three separate women in the course of one week in various motels and apartments, as well as holding down a regular job and taking his kids to baseball practice. His wife had suspected that he was having an affair but, unsurprisingly, she was a little shocked to hear that her husband was engaged in the type of extensive sexual entanglements usually associated with French farces. His time management skills were almost admirable, though, as were his energy levels. Milner was only a couple of years older than I was, and if I’d been trying to keep four women satisfied every week I’d have incurred a coronary, probably while I was soaking myself in a bath of ice to keep the swelling down. Nevertheless, that was still the best paying job I’d had in a while, and I was back doing a couple of days a month tending bar at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue, as much to pass the time as anything else.

‘I’m not as busy as you might think,’ I replied.

‘Then you’ll have time to hear me out, I guess.’

I nodded, then said: ‘Before we go any further, I’d just like to say that I was sorry to hear about Damien.’

I hadn’t known Damien Patchett any better than I knew his father, and I hadn’t made any effort to attend the funeral. The newspapers had been discreet about it, but everybody knew how Damien Patchett had died. It was the war, some whispered. He had taken his own life in name only. Iraq had killed him.

Bennett’s face creased with pain. ‘Thank you. In a way, as you might have figured, it’s why we’re here. I feel kind of funny approaching you about this. You know, you doing the things that you do: compared to them fellas who killed and got hunted down by you, what I’ve got to offer might seem pretty dull.’

I was tempted to tell him about waiting outside motel rooms while people inside engaged in illicit sexual congress, or sitting for hours in a car with a camera on the dashboard in the hope that someone might bend down suddenly.

‘Sometimes, the dull stuff makes a pleasant change.’

‘Ayuh,’ said Patchett. ‘I can believe that.’

His eyes shifted to the newspaper before me, and he winced again. Sally Cleaver, I thought. Damn, I should have put the newspaper away before Bennett arrived.

Sally Cleaver had been working at the Downs Diner when she died.

He sipped his coffee, and didn’t speak again for at least three minutes. People like Bennett Patchett didn’t reach their later years in pretty much perfect health by rushing things. They worked on Maine time, and the sooner that everyone who had to deal with them learned to adjust their clocks accordingly, the better.

‘I got a girl waitressing for me,’ he said at last. ‘She’s a good kid. I think you might remember her mother, woman name of Katie Emory?’

Katie Emory had been at Scarborough High School with me, although we’d moved in different circles. She was the sort of girl who liked jocks, and I wasn’t much for jocks, or the girls who hung with them. When I returned to Scarborough as a teenage boy after my father’s death, I wasn’t much in the mood for hanging with anyone, and I kept myself to myself. The local kids had all formed long-established cliques, and it was hard to break into them, even if you wanted to. I made some friends eventually, and for the most part I didn’t cross too many people. I remembered Katie, but I doubt if she would have remembered me, not in the normal course of events. But my name had made the papers over the years, and maybe she, and others like her, read it and remembered the boy who had arrived in Scarborough for the last two years of his schooling, trailing stories about a father who was a cop, a cop who had killed two kids before taking his own life.

‘How’s she doing?’

‘She lives up along the Airline somewhere.’ The Airline was the local name for Route 9, which ran between Brewer and Calais. ‘Third marriage. Shacked up with a musician.’

‘Really? I didn’t know her that well.’

‘Good for you. Could have been you shacked up with her.’

‘There’s a thought. She was a good-looking girl.’

‘Still not such a bad-looking woman now, I suppose,’ said Bennett. ‘A little thicker around the trunk than you might recall, but you can see what she was. Can see it in the daughter too.’

‘What’s the daughter’s name?’

‘Karen. Karen Emory. Only child of her mother’s first marriage, and born after the father took to his heels, so she has her mother’s name. Only child of any of her marriages, come to think on it. She’s been working for me for over a year now. Like I said, a good kid. She’s got her troubles, but I think she’ll come through them all right, long as she’s given the help that she needs, and she’s got the sense to ask for it.’

Bennett Patchett was an unusual man. He and his wife, Hazel, who had died a couple of years ago, had always viewed those who worked for them not simply as staff, but as part of a kind of extended family. They had a particular fondness for the women who passed through the Downs, some of whom stayed for many years, others for only a matter of months. Bennett and Hazel had a special sense for girls who were in trouble, or who needed a little stability in their lives. They didn’t pry, and they didn’t preach, but they listened when they were approached, and they helped when they could. The Patchetts owned a couple of buildings around Saco and Scarborough, and these they had converted into cheap lodgings for their own staff and for the staff of a select number of other established businesses run by people of a similar outlook to themselves. The apartments weren’t mixed, so that women and men were required to stay with their own sex. Some occasional meetings of the twain did inevitably occur, but less often than one might have thought. For the most part, those who took up the Patchetts’ offer of a place to stay were happy with the space – not just physical, but psychological and emotional – that it offered them. The majority moved on eventually, some getting their lives back together and some not, but while they worked for the Patchetts they were looked out for, both by the couple themselves and by the older members of staff. Sally Cleaver’s death had been a grave blow, but, if anything, it had made them more solicitous toward their charges. While Bennett had taken his wife’s death hard, the loss of her had not changed his attitude toward his staff one iota. Anyway, they were now all that he had left, and he saw Sally Cleaver in the face of every one of those women, and perhaps he had already begun to see Damien in the young men.

‘Karen’s fallen in with a man, one I don’t much care for,’ said Bennett. ‘She was living in one of the staff houses, just up on Gorham Road. She and Damien, they got on well together. I thought he might have had a crush on her, but she only had eyes for this friend of his, a buddy from Iraq by the name of Joel Tobias. Used to be Damien’s squad leader. After Damien died, or it could have happened even before he died, Karen and Tobias hooked up. I hear that Tobias is troubled by some of what he saw over in Iraq. He had friends die on him, and I mean literally. They bled to death in his arms. He wakes up in the night, screaming and sweating. She thinks that she can help him.’

‘She told you this?’

‘No. I heard it from one of the other waitresses. Karen wouldn’t tell me that kind of thing. I suppose she prefers to talk to other women about these matters, that’s all, and she knows that I didn’t approve of her moving in with Tobias so soon after they’d met. Maybe I’m old-fashioned that way, but I felt that she should wait. Told her so, too. They hadn’t been together more than a couple of weeks at that point and, well, I asked her if she didn’t feel that she was rushing things a bit, but she’s a young girl, and she thinks she knows her own mind, and I wasn’t about to interfere. She wanted to keep working for me, and that was just fine. We’ve been hurting a bit lately, same as everywhere, but I don’t need to make more from the place than lets me pay my bills, and I can still do that, with money to spare. I don’t need more staff and, I guess, it might be said that I don’t need all of the ones I’ve got, but they need the work, and it does an old man good to have young people around him.’

He finished his coffee and looked longingly at the pot on the other side of the counter. As if by telepathy, Kyle looked up from where he was cleaning the prep station and said: ‘Go get that pot, if you want some. It’ll go to waste otherwise.’

Bennett walked around to the other side of the counter and poured us both a little more coffee. When he had done so, he remained standing, staring out of the window at the old courthouse, thinking on what he would say next.

‘Tobias is older than her: mid-thirties. Too old and too screwed up for a girl like her. Got himself wounded over in Iraq, lost some fingers and damaged his left leg. He drives a truck now. He’s an independent contractor, or that’s what he calls himself, but he seems to work pretty casually. He always had time to hang out with Damien, and he’s always around Karen, more than someone who’s supposed to be on the road earning a living should be, like money isn’t a worry for him.’

Bennett opened some creamer and added it to his coffee. There was another pause. I didn’t doubt that he’d spent a lot of time considering what he was going to say, but I could tell that he was still cautious about speaking all of it aloud.

‘You know, I got nothing but respect for the military. Couldn’t help but have, man my father was. My eyesight hadn’t been so bad, I’d probably have gone to Vietnam, and it might be that we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. Maybe I wouldn’t be here, but buried under a white stone somewhere. Whatever, I’d be a different man, or even a better one.

‘I don’t know the rights and wrongs of that war in Iraq. Seems to me to be a long way to go for no good cause that I can see, with a lot of lives lost, but it could be that wiser minds than mine know something that I don’t. Worse than that, though, they didn’t look after those men and women who came back, not the way they should have. My father, he returned from World War Two wounded, but he just didn’t know it. He was damaged inside by some of the things that he’d seen and done, but the damage didn’t have the same medical name then, or people just didn’t understand how bad it could be. When Joel Tobias came into the Downs, I could tell that he was damaged too, and not just in his hand and his leg. He was hurting inside as well, all torn up with anger. I could smell it on him, could see it in his eyes. Didn’t need anyone to tell me about it.

‘Don’t misunderstand me: he has as much of a right to be happy as anyone, maybe even more so because of the sacrifices that he’s made. The hurt he’s going through, mental or physical, doesn’t deny him that right, and it could be that, in the normal run of events, someone like Karen might be good for him. She’s been hurt too. I don’t know how, but it’s there, and it makes her sensitive to others like herself. A good man could be healed by that, once he doesn’t exploit it. But I don’t think Joel Tobias is a good man. That’s what it comes down to. He’s wrong for her, and he’s just plain wrong with it.’

‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

‘I can’t,’ he said, and I could hear the frustration in his voice. ‘Not for sure. It’s a gut feeling, though, and something more than that. He drives his own rig, and it looks as new as a baby in the nurse’s arms. He’s got a big Silverado, and that’s new too. He lives in a pretty nice house in Portland, and he’s got money. He throws it around some, more than he should. I don’t like it.’

I waited. I had to be careful with what I said next. I didn’t want to sound like I was doubting Bennett, but at the same time I knew that he could be overprotective of the young people in his charge. He was still trying to make up for failing to protect Sally Cleaver, even though he could not have prevented what befell her, and it was not his fault.

‘You know, all of that could be on credit,’ I said. ‘Until recently, they’d let you pay a nickel down to see you drive a new truck off the lot. He may have received compensation for his injuries. You just-’

‘She’s changed,’ said Bennett. He said it so softly that I might almost have missed it, yet the intensity with which he spoke meant that it couldn’t be ignored. ‘He’s changed too. I can see it when he comes for her. He looks sick, like he’s not sleeping right, even worse than he was before. Lately, I’ve started to see it in her too. She burnt herself a couple of days back: tried to catch a coffeepot that was falling and ended up getting hot coffee on her hand. It was carelessness on her part, but the carelessness that comes from being tired. She’s lost some weight, and she was never carrying much to start off with. And I think he’s raised a hand to her. I saw bruising on her face. She told me that she’d walked into a door, like anyone believes that old story anymore.’

‘You try speaking to her about it?’

‘Tried, but she got real defensive. Like I said before, I don’t think she likes talking to men about personal matters. I didn’t want to pursue it further, not then, for fear that I’d drive her away entirely. But I’m worried for her.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘You still know them Fulci fellas? Maybe you could get them to beat on Tobias some, tell him to find someone else to share his bed.’

He said it with a sad smile, but I could tell that there was a part of him that would really have liked to see the Fulcis, who were essentially weapons of war with appetites, unleashed on a man who could hit a woman.

‘Doesn’t work,’ I said. ‘Either the woman starts to feel sorry for the guy, or the guy figures the woman has been talking to someone, and it gets worse.’

‘Well, it was a nice thought while it lasted,’ he said. ‘If that’s not an option, I’d like you to look into Tobias, see what you can find out about him. I just need something that might convince Karen to put some distance between her and him.’

‘I can do it, but there’s a chance that she won’t thank you for it.’

‘I’ll take that chance.’

‘Do you want to know my rates?’

‘Are you going to screw me over?’

‘No.’

‘Then I figure you’re worth what you ask for.’ He put an envelope on the counter. ‘There’s two thousand dollars down. How much is that good for?’

‘Long enough. If I need more, I’ll get back to you. If I spend less, I’ll refund you.’

‘You’ll tell me what you find out?’

‘I will. But what if I discover that he’s clean?’

‘He’s not,’ said Bennett firmly. ‘No man who hits a woman can call himself clean.’

I touched the envelope with my fingertips. I felt the urge to hand it back to him. Instead, I pointed at the Jandreau story.

‘Old ghosts,’ I said.

‘Old ghosts,’ he agreed. ‘I go out there sometimes, you know? Couldn’t tell you why, unless it’s that I hope I’ll be pulled back in time so I can save her. Mostly, I just say a prayer for her as I pass by. They ought to scour that place from the earth.’

‘Did you know Foster Jandreau?’

‘He came in sometimes. They all do: state troopers, local cops. We look after them. Oh, they pay their check like anyone else, but we make sure that they don’t leave hungry. I knew Foster some, though. His cousin, Bobby Jandreau, served with Damien in Iraq. Bobby lost his legs. Hell of a thing.’

I waited before speaking again. There was something missing here. ‘You said that this meeting was about Damien’s death, in a way. The only connection is Karen Emory?’

Bennett looked troubled. Any mention of his son must have been painful for him, but there was more to it than that.

‘Tobias came back troubled from that war, but my son didn’t. I mean, he’d seen bad things, and there were days when I could tell he was remembering some of them, but he was still the son I knew. He told me over and over that he’d had a good war, if such a thing is possible. He didn’t kill anyone who wasn’t trying to kill him, and he had no hatred for the Iraqi people. He just felt sorry for what they were going through, and he tried to do his best by them. He lost some buddies over there, but he wasn’t haunted by what he’d been through, not at first. That all came later.’

‘I don’t know much about post-traumatic stress,’ I said, ‘but from what I’ve read, it can take some time to kick in.’

‘There is that,’ said Bennett. ‘I’ve read about it too. I was reading about it before Damien died, thinking that I might be able to help him if I understood better what he was going through. But, you see, Damien liked the army. I don’t think he wanted to leave. He served multiple tours, and would have gone back again. As it was, all he talked about when he got back was re-enlisting.’

‘Why didn’t he?’

‘Because Joel Tobias wanted him here.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘From what Damien said. He took a couple of trips up to Canada with Tobias, and I got the sense that they had something going on, some deal that promised good money at the end of it. Damien began to talk about setting up his own business, maybe moving into security if he didn’t return to the army. That was when the trouble started. That was when Damien began to change.’

‘Change how?’

‘He stopped eating. Couldn’t sleep, and when he did manage to fall asleep I’d hear him crying out, and shouting.’

‘Could you hear what he was saying?’

‘Sometimes. He’d be asking someone to leave him alone, to stop talking. No, to stop whispering. He became anxious, and aggressive. He’d snap at me for nothing. When he wasn’t doing stuff for Tobias, he was somewhere by himself, smoking, staring into space. I suggested that he ought to talk to someone about it, but I don’t know if he did. He was back for three months when this all started, and he was dead by his own hand two weeks later.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘Look into that Tobias fella, and we’ll talk again.’

With that, he said his good-byes to Kyle and Tara, and left the diner. I watched him walk slowly to his car, a beat-up Subaru with a Sea Dogs sticker along the rear fender. As he opened the car door, he caught me watching him. He nodded and raised a hand in farewell, and I did likewise.

Kyle came out from the kitchen.

‘I’m going to lock up now,’ he said. ‘You all done?’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I paid the check, and left a good tip, both for the food and for Kyle’s discretion. There weren’t many diners in which two men could meet and discuss what Bennett and I had discussed without fear of eavesdropping.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Kyle, as Bennett’s car turned out of the lot.

‘Yes, he is.’

On the way back to Scarborough, I took a detour to drive by the Blue Moon. Yellow police tape flapped in the breeze from a downpipe, bright against the blackened shell of the bar. The windows remained boarded up, the steel door secured with a heavy bolt, but there was a hole in the roof where the flames had burst through all those years ago, and if you got close enough it smelled of damp and, even now, charred wood. Kyle and Bennett were right: it should have been demolished, but still it remained, like a dark cancer cell against the red clover of the field that stretched behind it.

I pulled away, the ruin of the Blue Moon receding in my rearview until at last I left it behind. Yet it seemed something of it remained on the mirror, like a smudge left by a blackened finger, a reminder from the dead of what the living still owe to them.

2

I thought about what Bennett Patchett had said when I returned to my house in Scarborough and sat down at my desk to make notes on our conversation. If Joel Tobias was beating his girlfriend then he deserved to experience some grief of his own, but I wondered if Bennett knew what he was getting himself into. Even if I found something that he could use against Tobias, I didn’t believe it would have much impact on the relationship, not unless what I found was so terrible that any woman who wasn’t clinically insane would instantly pack her bags and head for the hills. I had also tried to warn him that Karen Emory might not thank him for getting involved in her personal affairs, even if Tobias was being violent toward her. Still, if that had been Bennett’s sole reason for becoming involved in his employee’s business, his motives would have been sound, and I could have afforded to give him a little of my time. After all, he was paying for it.

The problem was that Karen Emory’s well-being was not the sole reason for his approach to me. In fact, it was a dupe, a means of opening a separate but linked investigation into the death of his son, Damien. It was clear that Bennett believed Joel Tobias bore some responsibility for the change in Damien Patchett’s behavior, a change that had led, finally, to his self-destruction. Ultimately, all investigations instigated by individuals and conducted outside the corporate or law enforcement spheres are personal, but some are more personal than others. Bennett wanted someone to answer for his son’s death in the absence of his son being able to answer for it himself. Some fathers, in a similar situation, might have directed their anger at the military for failing to recognize the torments of a returning soldier, or at the failings of psychiatrists, but, according to Bennett, his son had returned from the war relatively unscathed. That claim, in itself, warranted further investigation, but for now Joel Tobias was, in Bennett’s eyes, as much a suspect in Damien Patchett’s death as if he had steadied Damien’s hand as the trigger was pulled.

Bennett was a curious man. While he might have had a soft center, the exterior was like a crocodile’s plated carapace: Bennett was solid now, but he had served time. As a young man, he had fallen in with a group of guys out of Auburn who had taken down gas stations and grocery stores before progressing to the big time, and a raid on the Farmers First Bank in Augusta, during which a weapon was waved and shots were fired, albeit blanks. It hadn’t netted them a whole lot, about two thousand dollars plus change, and soon the cops had informally identified at least one of the members of the gang. He was hauled in, sweated for a while, and finally rolled over on the rest of his accomplices in return for a reduced sentence. Bennett, who had been the wheelman, was facing ten years and served five. He was no career criminal. Five years in Thomaston, a fortress prison from the nineteenth century, still bearing the mark of its old gallows as assuredly as if it had been burnt into the earth, had convinced him of the error of his ways. He had returned to his father’s business with his tail between his legs, and he’d kept out of trouble ever since. That didn’t mean that he had any great fondness for the law, and being ratted out by someone in the past meant that Bennett wasn’t about to rat out anyone else in turn. He may not have cared much for Joel Tobias, but hiring me instead of going to the cops was a very Bennettian compromise, I thought, as was asking me to investigate one man in the hope that it might reveal the truth behind the death of another.

Nothing is secret anymore. With a little ingenuity, and a little cash, you can find out a great deal about people that they might have believed, or have preferred to remain, confidential and protected. It’s even easier when you’re a licensed private investigator. Within an hour, I had Joel Tobias’s credit history laid out on my desk. There were no outstanding warrants against him and, from what I could see, he had never been in trouble with the police. Since he had been invalided out of the military just over a year earlier, he seemed to have worked hard, paid his bills, and led what, to all appearances, was a regular, blue collar existence.

One of my grandfather’s favorite words was ‘hinky’. Milk that was just about to go off might taste a little hinky. A tiny, almost inaudible noise in his car engine might lead to suspicions of undiagnosed hinkiness in the carburetor. For him, something that was hinky was more troubling than something that was outright wrong, simply because the nature of the flaw was undefined. He would know that it was there, but he would not be able to tackle it because its true face had not yet revealed itself. What was wrong could either be dealt with or lived with, but what was hinky would come between him and his sleep.

Joel Tobias’s affairs were hinky. His rig, with a sleeper, had cost him eighty-five thousand dollars when he’d bought it. Despite what Bennett had said, it wasn’t quite new when he picked it up, but it was as good as. At the same time, he’d also purchased a ‘dry van,’ or box trailer, for another ten thousand. He’d put five percent down, and was paying off the rest monthly, at a rate of interest that wasn’t excessive and might even have been considered pretty favorable, but he was still eating about twenty-five hundred dollars a month in payments. In addition, that same month he’d bought himself a new Chevy Silverado. He’d negotiated himself a pretty good deal on it: eighteen thousand dollars, which was six thousand off the regular dealer price, and he was paying that loan off at 280 dollars a month. Finally, the payments on the mortgage on his house in Portland, just off Forest and not far from the Great Lost Bear, as it happened, came to another thousand a month. The house had been his uncle’s, and had already fallen into arrears when it was left to Joel in his uncle’s will. Taken together, it all meant that Tobias needed to be taking in almost five thousand dollars each month just to keep his head above water, and that was before he paid for insurance, medical coverage, gas for his Chevy, food, heating, beer, and whatever else he needed to make his life comfortable. Add in, conservatively, another thousand dollars per month for all that, and Tobias’s annual earnings would have to be in the region of seventy thousand dollars after taxes. It wasn’t completely unattainable, given that, as an owner-operator, Tobias could expect to earn about ninety cents per mile, plus fuel, but he’d be working long hours to do it, and would need to put in the miles. In addition, he was probably receiving compensation for his injured hand, and maybe for his leg as well. At a guess, he was pulling down somewhere between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars tax free each month for his injuries, which would help some with his bills but would still leave him with a lot of cash to earn on the road. His credit rating remained steady, he hadn’t defaulted on any of his loans, and he was paying contributions into his IRA.

But according to Bennett, or the impression he had gained, Tobias wasn’t working all the hours God had given him. In fact, Tobias didn’t seem to have many financial worries at all, which suggested that there was money coming in from somewhere other than what he earned by driving, or received in comp; that, or he had money stored away, and was subsidizing his business from his savings, which meant that he wouldn’t be in business for very long.

So there it was. Joel Tobias was hinky. There was cash coming from elsewhere. It was just a matter of establishing the source of that additional income, and something that Bennett had told me meant that I could hazard an educated guess at that source. Bennett had said that Tobias traveled back and forth between Maine and Canada. Canada meant a border crossing, and a border meant smuggling.

And when it came to the border between Canada and Maine, that meant drugs.

According to an article in The New York Times, ‘To check smuggling along the Maine and Canada line would require a small army, so wild is the greater part of the territory and so great and varied the opportunities.’ The article in question was written in 1892, and it was as true now as it was then. In the late nineteenth century what worried the authorities most was the loss of customs revenue from liquor, fish, cattle, and produce being smuggled over the border, but drugs were also becoming an issue, with opium being brought into New Brunswick in bond, and from there transported into the United States via Maine. The state had four hundred miles of land border with Canada, most of it wilderness, as well as three thousand miles of seacoast, and about fourteen hundred small islands. It was then, and still is, a smuggler’s paradise.

In the 1970s, as the DEA began focusing increasingly on the southern border with Mexico, New England became an attractive option for pot smugglers, especially as there was a ready market for it among the students in its 250 colleges. It was simply a matter of buying a boat, hitting Jamaica or Colombia, and then running an established route that allowed a ton each to be dropped off in Florida, the Carolinas, Rhode Island and, finally, Maine. Since then, the Mexicans had established a presence here, along with assorted South Americans, bikers, and anyone else who figured he was hard enough to capture a share of the narcotics market, and hold on to it.

I sat back in my chair and stared out of my window at the salt marshes and the seabirds scudding across their waters. To the south, a thin column of dark smoke raised itself to the sky before slowly dissipating in the still air, leaving a faint trace of pollution to mar the otherwise faultless blue of the gently closing day. I called Bennett Patchett, and he confirmed that Karen Emory was working. Her shift was due to finish at 7 p.m. and, as far as Bennett knew, Joel Tobias would be coming by to pick her up. He often did when he wasn’t out on the road. Karen had told Bennett, after he had asked if she could work a little late that evening, that she couldn’t because she and Joel were going out for dinner. She said that Joel had a bunch of Canadian runs lined up over the coming weeks, and they were unlikely to have much time together as a result. So, with nothing better to do, I decided to take a look at Joel Tobias and his girlfriend.

The Downs was a pretty big place, capable of taking a hundred covers or more, assuming the kitchen was fully staffed and the waitresses were prepared to sweat hard for their tips. Large glass windows looked down on Route 1 and the parking lot of the Big 20 bowling alley on the other side of the road. A single counter ran almost the entire length of the room, taking a dogleg to the north and south to form a kind of elongated U. The walls were lined with four-seater booths, with another bank of four-seaters creating an island of vinyl and Formica in the center of the restaurant. The waitresses wore blue t-shirts with the name of the restaurant on the back, beneath which was an illustration of three horses straining for a finishing post. Each waitress had her name stitched into the fabric above her left breast.

I didn’t go inside, but waited in the parking lot. I could see Karen Emory depositing checks on her tables in preparation for the end of her shift. Bennett had described her to me, and she was the only blonde working that evening. She was pretty and tiny, perhaps only five feet tall, and slimly built for the most part, given that, even from a distance, her t-shirt looked like it was at least a size too small for her around the bust. Guys probably came to the Downs just to dribble egg on their chin as they gazed upon the stretched material.

At 6:55 p.m., a black Silverado with smoked glass windows pulled into the lot. Twenty minutes later, Karen Emory emerged wearing a short black dress and heels, her hair loose on her shoulders and freshly applied makeup on her face. She climbed into the Silverado, and it turned left on to Route 1, heading north. I stayed behind it all the way to South Portland, where it pulled into the Beale Street Barbecue on Broadway. Karen got out first, followed by Joel Tobias. He was at least a foot taller than his girlfriend, his dark hair, a little long and already streaked with gray, brushed back over his ears and away from his forehead. He wore jeans and a blue denim shirt. If there was any fat on him, it was well hidden. He walked with a slight limp, favoring his right foot, and kept his left hand tucked into front pocket of his jeans.

I gave them a couple of minutes, then followed them inside. They were sitting at one of the tables near the door, so I took a seat at the bar and ordered a bottle of alcohol-free beer and some fries, positioning myself so I could watch the TV and the table occupied by Tobias and Karen. They seemed to be having a good time. They got a couple of margaritas with beer on the side, and shared a sampler plate. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, mostly on Karen Emory’s part, but it seemed kind of strained, or that might have been Bennett Patchett’s opinion coloring my own. I tried to blot out all that he had said, and just regard them as a couple of interesting strangers in a restaurant. Nope, Karen was still trying too hard, an impression confirmed when Tobias went to the men’s room and Karen’s smile gradually faded as she watched him walk away, to be replaced by a look that was equal parts thoughtful and troubled.

I had just ordered another beer, which I didn’t plan to drink, when Joel Tobias appeared at my elbow. I didn’t react when he squeezed in at the bar and asked the bartender for the check, pointing out that the waitress appeared to be busy elsewhere. He turned to me, smiled, said ‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ and returned to his girlfriend. I caught a glimpse of his left hand as he walked away: there were two fingers missing, and the skin was scarred. A minute or two later, the waitress arrived, picked up the check at the bar on the instructions of the bartender, and brought it to their table. A couple of minutes more, and they had paid up and left.

I didn’t follow them. It had been enough to watch them together, and Tobias’s appearance at my side had made me uneasy. I hadn’t seen him return from the men’s room, which meant that he must have gone outside through the side door and come back in by the main door. Maybe he’d smoked a cigarette while he was out there but, if so, he was strictly a two-drag guy. It was probably just a coincidence, but I wasn’t about to confirm any suspicions he might have had about my presence there by running out to the parking lot and taking after them with squealing tires. I finished most of the beer that I hadn’t wanted, and watched some more of the game on the TV, before settling up and leaving the bar. The parking lot was almost empty, the black Silverado long gone. It was not yet 10 p.m., and there was still light in the sky. I drove into Portland to take a ride by Joel Tobias’s place. It was a small, well-maintained two-story. The Silverado was parked in the drive, but there was no sign of Tobias’s big rig. A light burned in an upstairs room, visible through the partly closed drapes, but as I watched it was extinguished, and the house became entirely dark.

I waited for a moment or two longer, regarding the house, and thinking about the look of Karen Emory’s face, and the way that Tobias had appeared at my elbow, before I drove back to Scarborough, and my own quiet home. There had been a woman and a child with me once, and a dog, but they were in Vermont now. I visited my daughter, Sam, once or twice a month, and sometimes she came to stay with me for a night if her mother, Rachel, had business in Boston. Rachel was seeing someone else, and I felt awkward intruding upon her for that reason and, sometimes, resentful of her for doing so. But I also kept my distance because I wanted no harm to come to them, and harm followed me.

Their places had been taken by the shadows of another woman and child – no longer glimpsed, but felt nonetheless, like the lingering scent of flowers that have been discarded after the petals began to fall. They had ceased to be a source of unease, this departed wife and daughter. They had been taken from me by a killer, a man whose life I had taken in turn, and in my guilt and rage I had allowed them to become transformed for a time into hostile, vengeful presences. But that was before: now, the sense of them consoled me, for I knew that they had a part to play in whatever was to come.

When I opened the door, the house was warm, and filled with the smell of salt from the marshes. I felt the emptiness of the shadows, the disinterest of the silence, and I slept softly, and alone.

3

Jeremiah Webber had just poured a glass of wine to ease himself into the act of cooking his evening meal when the doorbell rang. Webber did not like his routines being interrupted, and Thursday evenings at his relatively modest home – modest, at least, by the wealthy standards of New Canaan, Connecticut – were sacrosanct. On Thursday evenings he switched off his cell phone, did not answer the land line (and, in truth, his few friends, aware of his quirks, knew better than to disturb him, mortality, impending or actual, being the only permissible excuse), and most certainly did not respond to the ringing of the doorbell. His kitchen was at the back of the house, and he kept the door closed while he cooked so that only a thin horizontal shaft of light might possibly be visible through the glass of the front door. A lamp burned in the living room, and another in his bedroom upstairs, but that was the sum total of the illumination in the house. Bill Evans was playing at low volume on the kitchen’s sound system. Webber would sometimes spend the preceding days of the week planning precisely what music he would play while cooking and eating, what wine would accompany his meal, what dishes he would prepare. These small indulgences helped to keep him sane.

On Thursday evenings, therefore, those who knew that he was at home were unlikely to interrupt him, and those who did not know for certain if he was there or not would be unable to confirm his presence or absence merely on the basis of the lights in the house. Even his most valued clients, some of whom were wealthy men and women used to having their needs met at any hour of the day or night, had come to accept that, on Thursday nights, Jeremiah Webber would be unavailable. His routine had already been thrown slightly on this particular Thursday by a series of extended telephone conversations, so that it had been after eight by the time he returned home, and now it was nearly nine and he had still not eaten. More so than usual, he was in no mood for interruptions.

Webber was an urbane, dark-haired man in his early fifties, good looking in what might have been considered a slightly effeminate way, an impression enhanced by his fondness for spotted bow ties, bright vests, and a range of cultural interests including, but not limited to, ballet, opera, and modern interpretive dance. It led casual acquaintances to assume that he might be homosexual, but Webber was not gay; far from it, in fact. His hair had not yet begun to turn even slightly gray, a genetic quirk that took ten years off his age, and had enabled him to date women who were, by any standards, too young for him without attracting the form of disapproving, if envious, attention that such May-December assignations frequently aroused. His relative attractiveness to the opposite sex, combined with a degree of personal generosity to those who found his favor, had proved to be a mixed blessing. It had brought two marriages to fraught ends, only the first of which he actually regretted, for he had loved his first wife, if not quite enough. The child of that marriage, his daughter and only offspring, had ensured that the lines of communication remained open between the estranged partners, with the result that he believed his first wife now viewed him, for the most part, with a certain bemused affection. The second marriage, meanwhile, was a mistake, and one that he did not intend to make again, now preferring casual to committed when it came to sex. So he rarely wanted for female company, even if he had paid a price for his appetites in broken marriages, and the financial penalties that come hand in hand with such matters. As a consequence, Webber had recently found himself with serious cash flow problems, and had been forced to take steps to rectify the situation.

He was about to commence deboning the trout that lay upon a small granite slab when he heard the bell. He wiped his fingers on his apron, picked up the remote control unit, and turned the volume down still further, listening carefully. He walked to the kitchen door and stared at the small video screen by the intercom.

There was a man standing on his doorstep. He was wearing a dark fedora, and his face was turned away from the camera lens. But, as Webber watched, the man’s head moved, as though he were somehow aware that he was under examination. He kept his head lowered, so that his eyes were hidden in shadow, but from the brief glimpse of his face that he caught, Webber could tell that the man on the doorstep was a stranger to him. There appeared to be a mark on the man’s upper lip, but perhaps that was simply a trick of the light.

The doorbell rang a second time, and the man kept his finger on the button, so that the two-note sequence repeated itself over and over.

‘What the hell?’ said Webber aloud. His finger hit the intercom button. ‘Yes? Who are you? What do you want?’

‘I want to talk,’ said the man. ‘Who I am doesn’t matter, but for whom I work should concern you.’ His speech was slightly unclear, as though he were holding something in his mouth.

‘And who is that?’

‘I represent the Gutelieb Foundation.’

Webber released the intercom button. His right index finger went to his mouth. He chewed at the nail, a habit of his since childhood, an indication of distress. The Gutelieb Foundation: he had only engaged in a handful of transactions with it. Everything had been conducted through a third party, a firm of lawyers in Boston. Attempts to discover precisely what the Gutelieb Foundation might be, and who might be responsible for deciding on its acquisitions, had proved fruitless, and he had begun to suspect that it did not exist as anything more than a piece of convenient nomenclature. When he had persisted in his efforts, he had received a letter from the lawyers advising him that the organization in question was very particular about its privacy, and any further inquiries on Webber’s behalf would result in an immediate cessation of all business from the foundation, as well as some appropriately placed whispers indicating that perhaps Mr. Webber was not as discreet as some of his customers might wish him to be. After that, Webber had backed off. The Gutelieb Foundation, real or a front, had sourced some unusual, and expensive, items from him. The tastes of those behind it appeared to be very particular, and when Webber had been able to satisfy those tastes he had been paid promptly, and without question or negotiation.

But that last item… He should have been more careful in his dealings, more attentive about its provenance, he told himself, even as he understood that he was simply preparing the lies he might offer in exculpation to the man on his doorstep if it became necessary to do so.

He reached for his wine with his left hand, but misjudged the movement. The glass crashed to the floor, splashing his slippers and the bottoms of his trousers. Swearing, Webber returned to the intercom. The man was still there.

‘I’m rather busy at the moment,’ he said. ‘Surely this is something that can be discussed during normal hours.’

‘One would have thought so,’ came the reply, ‘but we seem to be having trouble getting your attention. A number of messages have been left with your service, and at your place of business. If we did not know better, we might have begun to believe that you are deliberately avoiding us.’

‘But what is this about?’

‘Mr. Webber, you’re trying my patience, just as you have tried the patience of the foundation.’

Webber gave in. ‘All right, I’m coming.’

He looked at the wine pooling on the black-and-white tiled floor, carefully avoiding the broken glass. Such a shame, he thought, as he discarded his apron. He made his way to the front door, pausing only to remove the gun from the hall stand and slip it into the back of his trousers beneath his cardigan. The weapon was small and easily concealed. He checked his reflection in the mirror, just to be sure, and opened the door.

The man on the doorstep was smaller than he expected, and dressed in a dark blue suit that might, at one point, have been an expensive purchase, but now looked dated, although it had survived the intervening years with a degree of grace. There was a blue and white spotted handkerchief in the breast pocket that matched the man’s tie. His head was still lowered, but now it was part of the gesture of removing his hat. For a moment, Webber had a strange vision of the hat coming off and taking the top of the visitor’s head with it, like an egg that has been neatly broken, permitting him to peer into the cavity of the skull. Instead, there were only loose strands of white hair like tendrils of cotton candy, and a domed head that came to a discernible point. Then the man looked up at him, and, instinctively, Webber took a small step back.

The face was quite pale, the nostrils slim dark holes cut into the base of the narrow, perfectly straight nose. The skin around the eyes was wrinkled and bruised. It spoke of illness and decay. The eyes themselves were barely visible, obscured as they were by folds of skin that had descended on them from the forehead like wax melting from an impure candle. Below the eyeballs, red flesh was visible, and Webber thought that this individual must have been constantly irritated by grit and dust.

But then the man clearly had other distractions when it came to pain. His upper lip was distorted, reminding Webber of those photographs in Sunday newspapers of children with cleft palates that were used to elicit charitable donations, except this was no cleft palate: it was a wound, an arrowhead incision into the skin exposing white teeth and discolored gums. It was also grossly infected, red raw and speckled in places with purple dots darkening to black. Webber thought that he could almost see the bacteria eating away at the flesh, and wondered at how this man could bear the torment, and what kind of drugs he would have to take just to allow him to sleep. In fact, how could he even bear to look at himself in a mirror and be reminded of his body’s betrayal and his own clearly imminent mortality? His age was impossible to surmise because of his illness, but Webber put him at between fifty and sixty, even allowing for the depredations he was suffering.

‘Mr. Webber,’ he said and, despite his wound, his voice was soft and pleasant. ‘Let me introduce myself. My name is Herod.’ He smiled, and Webber had to force his face to remain still and not register his disgust, for he feared that the movement of the visitor’s facial muscles would tear the wound on his lip still further, opening it to the septum. ‘I am often asked if I am fond of children. I take the question in good spirit.’

Webber wasn’t sure how to respond, so he simply opened the door a little wider to admit the stranger, his right hand moving almost casually to his waist and resting there within a hand’s reach of his gun. As Herod stepped into the house he nodded politely and glanced at Webber’s waist, and Webber felt sure that he knew of the gun, and that it didn’t bother him in the slightest. Herod looked toward the open kitchen, and Webber indicated that he should enter. He saw that Herod walked slowly, but it was not a function of his illness. Herod was just a man who moved with deliberation. Once in the kitchen, he laid his hat on the table and looked around, smiling in benign approval of all that he saw. Only the music seemed to disturb him, his forehead creasing slightly as he stared at the music system.

‘It sounds like… no, it is: it’s Fauré’s “Pavane,”’ he said. ‘I can’t say that I approve of what is being done to it, though.’

Webber gave an almost imperceptible shrug. ‘It’s Bill Evans,’ he said. Who didn’t like Bill Evans?

Herod contrived a little moue of disgust. ‘I’ve never cared for such experimentation,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that I am a purist in most matters.’

‘To each his own, I guess,’ said Webber.

‘Indeed, indeed. It would be a dull world if we all shared the same tastes. Still, it is hard not to feel that some are better resisted than indulged. Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘Be my guest,’ said Webber, with only a hint of unhappiness.

Herod sat, noting the wine and broken glass on the floor as he did so. ‘I hope I wasn’t the cause of that,’ he remarked.

‘My own carelessness. I’ll clean it up later.’ Webber didn’t want his hands full with a brush and pan while this man was in his kitchen.

‘I appear to have disturbed you in the act of preparing your meal. Please, by all means continue. I have no desire to keep you from it.’

‘It’s okay.’ Equally, Webber decided that he would rather not turn his back on Herod. ‘I’ll continue after you’ve gone.’

Herod considered this for a moment, as though resisting an impulse to comment upon it, then let it pass, like a cat that decides not to chase down and crush a butterfly. Instead, he examined the bottle of white Burgundy on the table, turning it gently with one finger so that he could read the label.

‘Oh, very good,’ he said. He turned to Webber. ‘Would you mind pouring a glass for me, please?’

He waited patiently as Webber, unused to guests making such demands of him, retrieved two glasses from the kitchen cabinet and poured a measure for Herod that, under the circumstances, was more than generous, then one for himself. Herod raised the glass and sniffed it. He removed a handkerchief from his trouser pocket, folded it neatly, then placed it against his chin as he took a sip from the glass with the corner of his mouth, avoiding the wound on his lip. A little of the wine trickled down and soaked into the handkerchief.

‘Wonderful, thank you,’ he said. He waved the hand kerchief apologetically. ‘One gets used to the necessity of sacrificing a little of one’s dignity in order to continue living as one might wish.’ He smiled again. ‘As you may have surmised, I am not a well man.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Webber. He struggled to put any emotion into the words.

‘I appreciate the sentiment,’ said Herod dryly. He raised a finger and pointed at his upper lip. ‘My body is riddled with cancers, but this is recent: a necrotizing illness that failed to respond to penicillin and vancomycin. The subsequent debridement did not remove all of the necrotic tissue, and now it seems that further explorations may be required. Curiously, it is said that my namesake, the slayer of infants, suffered from necrotizing fasciitis of the groin and genitalia. A punishment from God, one might say.’

Are you referring to the king, or yourself, Webber wondered, and it was as if the thought were somehow audible to Herod, for his expression changed, and what little benignity he had about him seemed to vanish.

‘Please, Mr. Webber, sit down. Also, you may want to remove your weapon from your belt. It can hardly be comfortable where it is, and I’m not armed. I came here to talk.’

Slightly embarrassed, Webber retrieved the weapon and placed it on the table as he took a seat across from Herod. The gun was still close if he needed it. He held his wineglass in his left hand, just to be safe.

‘To business, then,’ said Herod. ‘As I told you, I represent the interests of the Gutelieb Foundation. Until recently, it was felt that we had a mutually beneficial relationship with you: you sourced material for us, and we paid without complaint or delay. Occasionally, we required you to act on our behalf, purchasing at auction when we preferred to keep our interests hidden. Again, I believe that you were more than adequately compensated for your time in such cases. In effect, you were permitted to buy such items with our money, and sell them back to us at a mark-up that was considerably more than an agent’s commission. Am I correct? I am not overstating the nature of our understanding?’

Webber shook his head, but didn’t speak.

‘Then, some months ago, we asked you to acquire a grimoire for us: seventeenth century, French. Described as being bound in calfskin, but we know that was merely a ruse to avoid unwanted attention. Human skin and calfskin have, as we are both aware, very different textures. A unique item, then, to put it mildly. We gave you all of the information required for a successful, pre-emptive sale. We did not want the book to go to auction, even one as discreet and specialized as this one promised to be. But, for the first time, you failed to produce the goods. Instead, it appeared that another buyer got there before you. You handed back our money, and informed us that you would do better on the next occasion. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of the unique that “next time” never applies.’

Herod smiled again, this time regretfully: a disappointed teacher faced with a pupil who has failed to grasp a simple concept. The atmosphere in the kitchen had changed since Herod entered, palpably so. It was not merely the creeping unease that Webber felt at the direction that the conversation was taking. No, it felt to him that the force of gravity was slowly becoming greater, the air heavier. When he tried to raise his glass to his lips, the weight of it surprised him. Webber felt that, if he were to stand and try to walk, it would be like wading through mud or silt. It was Herod who was altering the very essence of the room, releasing elements from within himself that were changing the composition of every atom. There was a feeling of density about the dying man, for dying he most assuredly was, as though he were not flesh and blood but some unknown material, a thing of polluted compounds, an alien mass.

Webber managed to get the glass to his lips. Wine dribbled down his chin in an unpleasant imitation of Herod’s own previous indignity. He wiped it away with the palm of his hand.

‘There was nothing that I could do,’ said Webber. ‘There will always be competition for esoteric and rare finds. It’s hard to keep their existence a secret.’

‘Yet, in the case of the La Rochelle Grimoire, its existence was a secret,’ said Herod. ‘The foundation spends a great deal of time and effort tracking down items of interest that may have been forgotten, or lost, and it is very careful in its inquiries. The grimoire was traced after years of investigation. It had been incorrectly listed in the eighteenth century, and by an arduous process of cross-checking on our part, that error was confirmed. Only the foundation was aware of the grimoire’s significance. Even its owner regarded it merely as a curiosity; a valuable one, possibly, but with no awareness of how important it might be to the right collector. The foundation, in turn, nominated you to act on its behalf. You were required only to ensure that payment was made, and then arrange for safe transportation of the item. All of the hard work had been done for you.’

‘I’m not sure what you’re implying,’ said Webber.

‘I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you what occurred. You became greedy. You had dealt in the past with the collector Graydon Thule, and you knew that Thule had a particular passion for grimoires. You made him aware of the existence of the La Rochelle Grimoire. In return, he agreed to pay you a finder’s fee, and offered one hundred thousand dollars more for the grimoire than the foundation had earmarked in order to ensure that it would go to him. You did not pass on that full amount to the seller, but kept half of it for yourself, in addition to the finder’s fee. You then paid a subagent in Brussels to act on your behalf, and the grimoire went to Thule. I don’t think I’ve missed out on any details, have I?’

Webber was tempted to argue, to deny the truth of what Herod had said, but he could not. It had been foolish to think that he might be able to get away with the deception, but only in retrospect. At the time, it had seemed perfectly possible, even reasonable. He needed the money: his cash flow had slowed in recent months, for his business was not immune to the economic downturn. In addition, his daughter was a second year med student, and her fees were crucifying him. While the Gutelieb Foundation, like most of his clients, paid well, it did not pay well often enough, and Webber had been struggling for some time. He had made 120,000 dollars in total from acquiring the grimoire for Thule, once he had paid off the subagent in Brussels. That was a lot of money for him: enough to ease his debts, cover his share of Suzanne’s fees for the next year, and leave himself with a little in the bank. He began to feel a sense of indignation at Herod and his manner. Webber did not work for the Gutelieb Foundation. His obligations to it were minimal. True, his actions in the sale of the grimoire were not strictly honorable, but such deals happened all the time. Screw Herod. Webber had enough money to get by on for now, and he was in Thule ’s good books. If the Gutelieb Foundation cut him off, then so be it. Herod couldn’t prove anything of what he had just said. If inquiries were made about the money, Webber had enough false bills of sale to explain away a small fortune.

‘I think you should go now,’ said Webber. ‘I’d like to get back to preparing my meal.’

‘I’m sure that you would. Unfortunately, I am afraid that I can’t let the matter rest there. Some form of recompense must be made.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Yes, I’ve done some work for Graydon Thule in the past, but he has his sources too. I can’t be held responsible for every failed sale.’

‘You’re not being held responsible for every failed sale, just this one. The Gutelieb Foundation is very concerned with issues of responsibility. Nobody forced you to act as you did. That is the joy of free will, but also its curse. You must accept the blame for your actions. Amends must be made.’

Webber began to speak, but Herod silenced him with a raised hand.

‘Don’t lie to me, Mr. Webber. It insults me, and makes a fool out of you. Be a man. Acknowledge what you did, and we can set about arranging restitution. Confession is good for the soul.’ He reached out and laid his right hand upon Webber’s. Herod’s skin felt damp and cold, painfully so, but Webber was unable to move. Herod’s grip seemed to weigh him down.

‘Come,’ said Herod. ‘All that I ask from you is honesty. We know the truth, and now it is simply a matter of finding a way that we can both put this behind us.’

Those dark eyes glinted, like black spinels in snow. Webber was transfixed. He nodded once, and Herod responded with a similar gesture.

‘Things have been very difficult lately,’ said Webber. His eyes grew hot, and the words caught in his throat, as though he were about to cry.

‘I know that. These are hard times for many.’

‘I’ve never acted in this way before. Thule contacted me about another matter, and I just let it slip. I was desperate. It was wrong of me. I apologize: to you, and to the foundation.’

‘Your apology is accepted. Unfortunately, we now have to discuss the matter of restitution.’

‘Half of the money is already gone. I don’t know what sum you were considering but-’

Herod appeared surprised. ‘Oh, it’s not a matter of money,’ he said. ‘We don’t require money.’

Webber sighed with relief. ‘Then what?’ he said. ‘If you need information on items of interest, I may be able to provide it at a reduced rate. I can ask some questions, check my contacts. I’m sure that I can find something that will make up for the loss of the grimoire and-’

He stopped talking. There was now a manila envelope on the table, the kind with a cardboard back used to protect photographs.

‘What is that?’ asked Webber.

‘Open it and see.’

Webber picked up the envelope. There was no name or address on it, and it was unsealed. He reached inside and withdrew a single color photograph. He recognized the woman in the picture, captured when she was clearly unaware of the camera, her head turned slightly to the right as she gazed over her shoulder, smiling at someone or something out of shot.

It was his daughter, Suzanne.

‘What does this mean?’ he asked. ‘Are you threatening my daughter?’

‘Not as such,’ said Herod. ‘As I told you before, the foundation is very interested in concepts of free will. You had a choice in the matter of the grimoire, and you made it. Now, I have been instructed to give you another choice.’

Webber swallowed. ‘Go on.’

‘The foundation has authorized the rape and murder of your daughter. It may be some consolation to you to hear that the acts do not have to be committed in that order.’

Instinctively, Webber looked to his gun, then began to reach for it.

‘I should warn you,’ continued Herod, ‘that if anything happens to me, then your daughter will not see out this night, and her sufferings will be greatly increased. You may yet have use for that gun, Mr. Webber, but not now. Let me finish, then consider.’

Uncertain of what to do, Webber did nothing, and his fate was sealed.

‘As I said,’ Herod continued, ‘an action has been authorized, but it does not have to be carried out. There is another option.’

‘Which is?’

‘You take your own life. That is your choice: your life, ended quickly, or the life of your daughter, taken slowly and with much pain.’

Webber stared at Herod, dumbfounded.

‘You’re insane.’ But even as he said it, he knew that it wasn’t true. He had looked into Herod’s eyes, and he had seen nothing there but absolute sanity. It was possible that, with enough pain, a person might be driven to madness, but this was not the case with the man who sat opposite him. Instead, his suffering had given him perfect clarity: he had no illusions about the ways of the world, only an insight into its capacity for inflicting agony.

‘No, I am not. You have five minutes to choose. After that, it will be too late to stop what is about to occur.’

Herod sat back. Webber picked up the gun and pointed it at him, but Herod did not even blink.

‘Call. Tell them to leave her alone.’

‘So you’ve made your choice?’

‘No. There is no choice. I’m warning you that if you don’t make the call, I’ll kill you.’

‘And then your daughter will die.’

‘I could torture you. I can shoot you in the knee, the groin. I can keep hurting you until you accede to my demand.’

‘Your daughter will still die. You know that. At the most basic level, you acknowledge the truth of what you have been told. You must accept it, and choose. Four minutes, thirty seconds.’

Webber thumbed back the hammer on the revolver.

‘I’m telling you for the last time-’

‘Do you think that you’re the first man to have been presented with this choice, Mr. Webber? Do you honestly believe that I haven’t done this before? Ultimately, you must choose: your life, or the life of your daughter. Which do you value more?’

Herod waited. He glanced at his watch, counting the seconds.

‘I wanted to see her grow up. I wanted to see her marry, and become a mother. I wanted to be a grandfather. Do you understand?’

‘I understand. Her life will still be hers to live, and her children will lay flowers for you. Four minutes.’

‘Don’t you have anyone whom you love?’

‘No, I do not.’

The gun wavered in Webber’s hand as he realized the futility of his arguments.

‘How do I know that you’re not lying?’

‘About what? About raping and killing your daughter? Oh, I think you know that I mean what I say.’

‘No. About – about letting her go.’

‘Because I don’t lie. I don’t have to. Others lie. It is for me to present them with the consequences of those lies. For every fault, there must be a reckoning. For every action, there is a reaction. The question is: who do you love more, your daughter, or yourself?’

Herod stood. He had a cell phone in one hand, his wineglass in the other. ‘I’ll give you a private moment,’ he said. ‘Please don’t attempt to use a phone. If you do so, our deal will be off, and I’ll make sure that your daughter is raped to death. Oh, and my associates will also ensure that you don’t live to see the dawn.’

Webber did not try to stop Herod as he stepped slowly from the room. He seemed stunned into immobility.

In the hallway, Herod examined his reflection in a mirror. He straightened his tie, and brushed some lint from his jacket. He loved this old suit. He had worn it on many occasions like this one. He checked his watch a final time. From the kitchen, he discerned words being spoken. He wondered if Webber had been foolish enough to try to make a call, but the tone of voice was wrong. Then he thought that it might be Webber making an act of contrition, or saying some unheard good-bye to his daughter, but as he moved closer he heard Webber’s words.

‘Who are you?’ Webber was asking. ‘Are you the one, the one who’s going to hurt my Suzie? Are you? Are you?’

Herod glanced into the kitchen. Webber was staring at one of the kitchen windows. Herod saw Webber and himself reflected in the glass and, for just a moment, he thought that there might be a third figure visible, too insubstantial, Herod believed, to be someone in the garden looking in, and yet there was nobody else in the kitchen apart from the living, or the soon-to-be dead.

Webber turned to look at Herod. He was weeping.

‘Damn you,’ he said. ‘Damn you to hell.’

He put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot made Herod’s ears ring as it echoed off the tiled walls and floor of the kitchen. Webber fell, and lay bucking by his overturned chair. It was an amateurish way to turn a gun on oneself, Herod mused, but then Webber could hardly have been expected to be a professional in the art of suicide; the nature of the act precluded it. The barrel of the gun had pulled upward with the shot, blowing a chunk out of the top of Webber’s skull, but he had not managed to kill himself. Instead, his eyes were wide and his mouth was opening and closing spasmodically, rather like the final moments of the fish he had left on the slab. In a moment of mercy, Herod took the gun from Webber’s hand and finished the job for him, then drank the last of the wine in his glass and prepared to leave. He paused at the door, and peered back at the kitchen window. Something was wrong. Quickly, he moved to the counter and looked out upon Webber’s neatly tended, and gently illuminated, garden. It was surrounded by high walls, and blocked off by gates at either side of the house. Herod could see no sign of another person, yet he remained troubled.

He checked his watch. He had already stayed too long, especially if the shots had attracted attention. He found the main switchbox for the house in a closet beneath the stairs, and killed all of the lights, before taking a blue surgical mask from his inside pocket and placing it over the lower part of his face. In a way, the H1N1 virus had been a blessing to him. Oh, people still sometimes stared at him in passing, but for one who exhibited such signs of illness as he did, they were looks of understanding as much of curiosity. Then, concealed by shadows, Herod became part of the night, and he put Jeremiah Webber and his daughter from his mind forever. Webber had made a choice, the correct choice in Herod’s view, and his daughter would be allowed to live. Herod, who worked alone, despite his threats to Webber, would not harm her.

For he was an honorable man, in his way.

4

Far to the north, as the blood from Webber’s body mixed with spilled wine and congealed upon his kitchen floor, and Herod returned to the shadows from which he had emerged, the sound of a telephone ringing echoed around a forest glade.

The man curled on the filthy sheets was dragged back to consciousness by the noise, and he knew immediately that it was them. He knew because he had unplugged the phone before he went to sleep.

Lying on the bed, he moved only his eyes, glancing slowly in the direction of the handset, as though they were already there with him and any significant shift in position would alert them to the fact that he was awake.

Go away. Leave me alone.

The television boomed into life, and for an instant he caught a snatch of some old comedy from the sixties, one at which he could remember laughing with his mother and father as he sat between them on the sofa. He felt tears spring from his eyes at the memory of his parents. He was frightened, and he wanted them to protect him, but they were long gone from this Earth and he was all alone. Then the picture faded, leaving only static, and the voices came through the screen, just as they had the night before, and the night before that, and every night since he had taken delivery of the latest consignment. He began to shiver, although the air was warm.

Stop. Go away.

In the kitchen at the far end of the cabin, the radio began to play. It was his favorite show, A Little Night Music, or it used to be. He liked to listen to it just before he tried to sleep, but not any more. Now, when he turned on the radio, he could hear them behind the music, and in the spaces between symphonic movements, and talking over the announcer’s voice: not quite blocking him out, but loud enough that he could not concentrate on what was being said, the names of composers and conductors lost to him as he tried to ignore the foreign tongue that spoke so mellifluously. And even though he did not understand the words, the sense of them was clear to him.

They wanted to be set free.

At last, he could take it no longer. He jumped from his bed and grasped the baseball bat that he kept by his bedside, swinging it with a power and purpose that his younger self would have admired. The television screen imploded with a dull whomp and a cascade of sparks. Moments later, the radio was in pieces on the floor, and then only the phone remained to be dealt with. He stood above it, the bat poised, staring at the power cord that was not even close to the outlet, and the plastic connector cable that lay tantalizingly close to the box: not connected, yet still the phone was ringing. He should have been surprised, but he was not. In recent days, he had entirely lost the capacity for surprise.

Instead of reducing the phone to shards of plastic and circuitry, he put down the bat, and restored the power and the connection. He placed the receiver close to his ear, careful not to let it touch him for fear that the voices might somehow leap from the handset into his head and take up residence there, driving him to madness, or closer to it than he already was. He listened for a time, his mouth trembling, his tears still falling, before he dialed a number. The phone at the other end rang four times, and then a machine clicked on. It was always a machine. He tried to calm himself as best he could, then began to speak.

‘There’s something wrong,’ he said. ‘You need to get up here and take it all away. You tell everyone that I’m out. Just pay me what I’m owed. You can keep the rest.’

He hung up the phone, put on an overcoat and a pair of sneakers, and grabbed a flashlight. After a moment’s hesitation, he reached beneath his bed and found the green M12 universal military holster. He removed the Browning, slipped it into his overcoat pocket, picked up the baseball bat for added peace of mind and left the trailer.

It was a moonless night, heavy with cloud, so that the sky was black and the world seemed very dark to him. The flashlight beam scythed through the darkness as he made his way down to the row of boarded-up rooms, coming at last to number 14. His father returned to mind, and he saw himself as a boy, standing with the old man outside this very same room, asking him why there was no number 13, why the rooms went straight from 12 to 14. His father had explained to him that people were superstitious. They didn’t want to stay in room 13, or on the thirteenth floor of one of those big city hotels, and changes had to be made to set their minds at rest. So it was that 13 became 14, and everybody slept a little better as a result, even if, in truth, 14 was still 13, didn’t matter what way you chose to hide it. Big city hotels still had a thirteenth floor, and small motels like theirs still had a room 13. In fact, there were folk who wouldn’t stay in room 14 for precisely that reason but, generally, most guests didn’t notice.

Now he was alone outside 14. There was no sound from inside, but he could sense them. They were waiting for him to act, waiting for him to do what they wanted him to do, what they had been demanding over the radio, and the television, and in late-night calls from a phone that shouldn’t have worked but did: to be released.

The bolts on the door were still in place, the locks undamaged, but when he checked the screws that he had drilled into the frame through the wood, he found that three of them were loose, and one had fallen out entirely.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not possible.’ He picked up the screw from the ground and examined the head. It was intact and unmarked. He supposed that it was possible someone had come along while he was away from his trailer and used a drill to unscrew it, but why stop at one, and why leave some of the others only partially removed? It made no sense.

Unless…

Unless they had done it from inside. But how?

I should open it, he thought. I should open it and make sure. But he didn’t want to open it. He was afraid of what he might see, and of what he might be forced to do, for he knew that if he only ever performed one more good act in his life, it would be to ignore those voices. He could almost hear them in there, calling him, taunting him…

He returned to his trailer, found his big tool kit, and returned to 14. As he began to fit the bit into the drill, his attention was distracted by the sound of metal on wood. He put the drill down, and directed the flashlight beam at the door.

One of the remaining screws was turning gently, removing itself from the wood. While he watched, its length was at last fully exposed, and the screw fell to the ground.

Screws weren’t going to do it, not anymore. He put the drill aside and took out the nail gun. Breathing heavily, he approached the door, set the muzzle of the gun against the wood, and pulled the trigger. The force of the recoil jarred him slightly, but when he stepped back he saw that the nail, all six inches of it, was buried up to the head in the wood. He moved on, until there were 20 nails in the door. Removing them all would be a pain in the ass, but the fact that they were there for now made him feel a little more comfortable.

He sat on the damp ground. The screws were no longer moving, and there were no more voices.

‘Yeah,’ he whispered. ‘You didn’t like that, did you? Soon, you’ll be somebody else’s problem, and then I’ll be done. I’m gonna take my money and leave this place. I been here too long as it is. Gonna find me somewhere warm, hole up there for a time, uh-huh.’

He looked at the tool box. It was too damn heavy to haul all the way up to the trailer and, Lord knows, he might have need of it again before too long. Number 15 was secured only by a piece of plywood. Using his screwdriver, he prised out the two nails that held it in place, and placed his kit in the dark room beyond. He could make out the shape of the old cabinet on the left, and the bare frame of the bed, all rusted springs and broken posts, like the skeleton of some long-dead creature.

He turned and stared at the wall separating this room from 14. The paint was peeling, and it had bubbled in places. He placed his hand against one of the bubbles of paint, feeling it give way against his skin. He expected it to be moist to the touch, but it was not. Instead, it was warm, warmer than it should have been, not unless there was a fire blazing in the room on the other side. He moved his hand sideways, letting it trail along the wall until he came to a cooler patch, one on which the paint remained undamaged.

‘What the-?’ He spoke the words aloud, and the sound of his own voice in the gloom startled him, as though it were not he who had spoken but a version of himself that stood somehow apart, watching him with curiosity, a man aged beyond his years, damaged by war and loss, haunted by phones that rang in the dead of night and voices that spoke in unfamiliar tongues.

For as his palm rested against the paintwork, he felt the cool spot on the wall begin to grow warm. No, not just warm: hot. He closed his eyes briefly and an image flashed in his mind: a presence in the next room, a figure that was crooked and distorted, burning from within as it placed a hand against the paintwork on its own side and followed the progress of the man on the other, like a piece of metal drawn by a magnet.

He pulled his hand away and rubbed it against the leg of his sweat pants. His mouth and throat were dry. He felt the urge to cough, but he suppressed it. It was absurd, he knew: after all, he’d just drilled, and then nailed, a door closed, so it wasn’t as if he’d been quiet so far, but there was a difference between those mechanical noises and the simple human intimacy – and, say it, frailty – of a cough. So he covered his mouth with his hand and backed out of the room, leaving his tool box behind. He replaced the plywood, but didn’t bother trying to find a way of securing it again. The night was still, so there was no wind that might cause it to fall. He didn’t turn his back on the motel until he was at his cabin. Once inside, he locked the door, then drank some water, followed by a glass of vodka and some Nyquil to help him sleep. He called again the number he had dialed earlier, and left a second message.

‘One more night,’ he reiterated. ‘I want my money, and I want this stuff gone. I can’t do it no more. I’m sorry.’

Then he stamped the telephone to pieces before removing his shoes and overcoat and curling up in bed. He listened to the silence, and the silence listened back.

They were nickel and dimed, that was what he thought: right from the start, they were nickel and dimed. They’d even managed to spell his name wrong on his new identification tags: Bobby Jandrau instead of ‘Jandreau’. Damned if he was going to war with his name messed up: that was bad karma right there. Way they’d kicked up when he pointed it out, you’d have thought he wanted to be carried to Iraq in a sedan chair.

But then the rich always screw the poor, and this was a rich man’s war being fought by poor people. There was nobody wealthy waiting to fight alongside him, and had there been he would have asked them why, because there was no sense in being here if you had a better option. No, there were just men like himself, and some who were poorer yet, although he knew what it was to live short; still, by the standards of some of the guys he knew, who were on first name terms with poverty before they joined up, he was comfortable.

The brass told them that they were ready to deploy, ready to fight, but they didn’t even have body armor.

‘That’s ’cause the Iraqis ain’t going to fire at you,’ said Lattner. ‘They’ll just use sarcasm, and say mean things about your moms.’

Lattner, who was a long drink, maybe the tallest man he’d ever met, always called them his ‘moms’ and his ‘pops’. When he was dying, he asked for his moms, but she was thousands of miles away, probably praying for him, which might have helped. He was dosed up to take away some of the pain, and he didn’t know where he was. He thought that he was back in Laredo. They told him that his moms was on her way, and he died believing it.

They scavenged scraps of metal and flattened cans to make their own sappy plates. Later, they took body armor from dead Iraqis. The men and women who came later would be better equipped: pads, eye pro, Wiley-X sunglasses, even pieces of green card with answers to possible media questions, because by then it was all going to hell, jizzicked to fuck and back, as his old man used to say, and they didn’t want anybody speaking out of school.

There were no showers at the start: they bathed out of hard hats. They lived in ruined buildings and, later, five to a room without A/C in 130-degree heat. No sleep, no showers, weeks in the same clothes. In time there would be air-conditioning, and containerized housing units, and proper shitters, and a MWR center with Playstations and big-screen TVs, and a PX selling lame ‘Who’s Your Bagh-Daddy?’ t-shirts, and a Burger King. There would be Internet terminals, and phone centers open 24/7, except when a soldier was killed, when they would be closed until the family was informed. There would be a concrete mortar bunker by the door of the conex, so that you didn’t have to face them out in the open.

But he didn’t care about the difficulties, not at first. You didn’t sign up because you wanted to stay home and see out your time stateside. You signed up because you wanted to go to war, and what was it Secretary Rumsfeld said? You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. Then again, Secretary Rumsfeld still had all of his limbs, last time he looked, so it was kind of easy for him to say.

He had some tattoos on his arms: stupid childish shit, but not gang-related. He wasn’t even sure that there were any gangs in Maine worth getting tattooed over, and even if there were, the tattoos wouldn’t have meant much to real hardasses like the Bloods and the Crips. The army would eventually add another tat of its own: his dog-tag information was etched on his side, his ‘meat tag,’ so even if he was blown to pieces and his dog tags lost or destroyed, his body would still bear his identity. A staff sergeant promised a waiver for the old tats when he enlisted, even offered to clear up any minor criminal stuff that might have been on his sheet, but he didn’t have so much as a DUI to his name. He was guaranteed the good life: a signing bonus, paid leave, and a college education, if he wanted it, once he’d completed his time. He scored over 80 percent on the Vocational Aptitude Battery, the Army’s SATs, which made him eligible for a two-year enlistment, but he signed up for four. He didn’t have a whole lot else going on anyway, and a four-year enlistment meant that he would be guaranteed a slot with a particular division, and he wanted to serve with other men from Maine, if that was possible. He’d enjoyed being a soldier. He was good at it. It was why he reenlisted. If he hadn’t, then things would have been very different. The second time was the doozy. The second time was the killer.

But that was years away. First off, he was sent to Fort Benning for fourteen weeks of training, and he thought he was going to die on the second day. After basic, they gave him two weeks to kick around, then put him on the Hometown Recruiting Assistance Program where he was supposed to recruit his buddies in a Class A uniform, the army’s equivalent of a pyramid selling scheme, but his buddies weren’t buying. That was when he met Tobias. Even then, Tobias was an operator. He had a way of forming alliances, of cutting deals, of doing small favors that he could call in at a later date. Tobias took him under his wing.

‘You don’t know beans,’ Tobias told him. ‘You stick with me, and I’ll educate you.’

And he did. Tobias looked out for him, just as, in time, he himself had looked out for Damien Patchett, until the roles were reversed, and the bullets came, and he thought:

I am bait. I am a stalking goat.

I am going to die.

5

I was back at Joel Tobias’s place early the next morning. Instead of the Saturn, which, as on the night before, I sometimes used for surveillance, I’d been forced to drive the Mustang, just in case Tobias had any suspicions that he was being followed after our encounter the previous night. The Mustang wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, but I’d parked behind a truck in the lot of the Big Sky Bread Company on the corner of Deering Avenue, and had angled myself so that I could just about see Tobias’s house on Revere from where I was, but he would have trouble spotting me unless he came looking. His Silverado was still in the drive when I parked, and the drapes remained drawn at the upstairs window. Shortly after eight, Tobias appeared at the front door wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans. There was a tattoo on his left arm, but I couldn’t tell what it was from a distance. He got in his truck and hung a right. Once he was out of sight, I went after him.

There was plenty of traffic on the streets, and I was able to stay well back from Tobias while still keeping him in sight. I nearly lost him at Bedford when the lights changed, but I caught up a couple of blocks later. Eventually, he pulled into a warehouse complex off the Franklin arterial. I drove by, then slipped into the lot next door, where I watched Tobias park by one of three big rigs parked close to a chain link fence. He spent the next hour performing routine maintenance checks on his rig, then got back in the Silverado and returned to his house.

I filled up the Mustang’s tank, bought a cup of coffee at Big Sky, and tried to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. All that I knew so far was that Tobias’s finances didn’t add up, and he might be having troubles with his girlfriend, as Bennett had suggested, but I couldn’t help feeling that, in the end, little of this was any of my business. In theory, I could have stayed with him until he embarked on his planned run to Canada, followed him across the border, and then waited to see what transpired, but the chances of his not making me if I did follow him all the way up there were pretty slim. After all, if he was engaged in illegal activity, he was likely to be alert for any kind of surveillance, and a proper pursuit would require two, maybe three vehicles. I could have brought in Jackie Garner as the second driver, but Jackie didn’t work for free, not unless he was guaranteed a little fun and the possibility of being able to hit someone without legal consequences, and following a truck up to Quebec hardly sounded like Jackie’s idea of a good time. And if Tobias was smuggling, so what? I wasn’t an arm of US Customs.

The issue of whether or not he was hitting his girlfriend was another matter, but I couldn’t see how my involvement was going to improve that situation. Bennett Patchett was in a better position to make a discreet approach to Karen Emory than I was, perhaps through one of her female colleagues at the diner, since a complete stranger coming up to her and asking if her boyfriend had beaten her up lately was unlikely to endear himself to her.

I called Bennett’s cell phone. It went to voice mail, so I left a message. I tried the Downs, but he wasn’t there, and the woman who answered the phone told me that she didn’t expect him today. I hung up. My coffee was going cold. I opened my window and poured it out, then tossed the paper cup in the back of the car. I was bored and frustrated. I took a James Lee Burke novel from the glove compartment, sat back in my seat, and started to read.

Three hours later, my ass was aching and I had finished the book. The coffee had also made its way through my system. Like every good PI, I kept a plastic bottle in the car for just such an eventuality, but it hadn’t reached that stage as yet. I tried Bennett’s cell phone again, and once more it went to voice mail. Twenty minutes later, Karen Emory’s green Subaru appeared at the intersection, with Karen at the wheel. She was already wearing her blue Downs t-shirt. There appeared to be nobody else in the car with her. I let her go.

Half an hour later, Tobias’s Silverado appeared and headed for the highway. I followed him to the Nickelodeon Theater in Portland, where he bought a ticket for a comedy. I waited for twenty minutes, but he didn’t come out. For now, it seemed that Joel Tobias wasn’t heading to Canada, at least not today. Even if he was preparing for a night run, there was little that I could do to follow him. I was also due at the Bear that night, and the next, and I couldn’t let Dave Evans down. I felt that I had wasted a day, and Bennett wasn’t going to get his money’s worth out of me, not like this. It was now 5 p.m. I was due at the Bear by eight. I wanted to shower first, and I wanted to use the bathroom.

I drove back to Scarborough. It was a warm, close evening, with no breeze. By the time I had showered and changed, I had made a decision: I would charge Bennett for the hours I had put in so far, then give him back the rest of his money unless he could come up with a pressing reason why I should not. If he wanted me to, and he acted as an intermediary, I’d sit down with Karen Emory for free and advise her on her options if she was experiencing domestic abuse. As for Joel Tobias, assuming that he wasn’t making up the shortfall in his finances through entirely legal means of which I had no knowledge, he could continue doing whatever it was he was doing until the cops, or customs, caught up with him. It wasn’t an ideal compromise, but then compromises rarely were.

The Bear was buzzing that night. There were some state cops drinking at the far end of the bar, away from the door. I considered it politic to avoid them, and Dave agreed. They had no love for me, and one of their number, a detective named Hansen, was still on medical leave having involved himself in my affairs earlier in the year. It was no fault of mine, but I knew that his colleagues didn’t see it that way. I spent the evening taking care of orders from the waitstaff, and left the two regular bartenders to look after those seated at the bar. The night passed quickly, and by midnight I was done. For the sake of it, I took another ride past Joel Tobias’s place. The Silverado was still there, along with Karen Emory’s car. When I went to the warehouse complex off Federal, Tobias’s rig hadn’t moved.

My phone rang as I was halfway home. The caller ID showed Bennett Patchett’s number, so I pulled in at a Dunkin’ Donuts and answered.

‘Calling a little late, Mr. Patchett,’ I said.

‘Figured you for a night owl, like myself,’ he replied. ‘Sorry for taking so long to return your call. I was tied up with legal business all day and, to tell you the truth, when I was done with it I didn’t much feel like checking my messages. But I’ve had a nightcap, and I feel a bit more relaxed now. You find out anything worth mentioning?’

I told him that I hadn’t, apart from the possibility that Joel Tobias’s finances didn’t quite add up, and Bennett had suspected as much already. I went over my concerns with him: how I believed that following Tobias would be difficult without additional manpower, and that perhaps there were better ways of dealing with the possibility that Karen Emory was a victim of domestic abuse.

‘And my boy?’ said Bennett. His voice cracked when he said it, and I wondered if he’d had more than a single nightcap. ‘What about my boy?’

I didn’t know what to tell him. Your boy is gone, and this won’t bring him back. Post-traumatic stress took him, not his involvement with whatever Joel Tobias might be doing under the guise of a legitimate trucking business.

‘Look,’ said Bennett. ‘It may be that you think I’m a foolish old man who can’t accept the circumstances of his son’s death, and, you know, that’s probably true. But I have a good sense for people, and Joel Tobias is crooked. I didn’t like him when I first met him, and I wasn’t happy about Damien getting involved in his affairs. I’m asking you to keep on this. It’s not a question of money. Money I got. If you need to hire some help, then do it and I’ll pay for that as well. What do you say?’

What was there to say? I said that I’d give it a few more days, even though I believed it was pointless. He thanked me, then hung up. I stared at the phone for a time before tossing it on the seat beside me.

That night, I dreamed of Joel Tobias’s rig. It stood in a deserted lot, its container unlocked, and when I opened it there was only blackness, blackness that extended farther than the rear of the container, as though I were staring into a void. I felt a presence approaching fast from out of the darkness, rushing toward me from the abyss, and I woke to the first light of dawn and the sense that I was no longer quite alone.

The room smelled of my dead wife’s perfume, and I knew that it was a warning.

6

The mail boat was departing for its morning run as I parked at the Casco Bay terminal, a handful of passengers on board, most of them tourists, watching as the wharf receded, taking in the bustle of the fishing boats and the ferries. The mail boat was an integral part of life on the bay, a twice-daily link between the mainland and the folk on Little Diamond and Great Diamond and Diamond Cove, on Long Island and Cliff Island and Peaks Island, on Great Chebeague, the largest of the islands on Casco Bay, and on Dutch Island, or Sanctuary as it was sometimes called, the most remote of the ‘Calendar Islands.’ The boat was a point of connection not only between those who lived by the sea and those who lived on the sea, but also between the inhabitants of the various outposts on Casco Bay.

The sight of the mail boat always brought with it a hint of nostalgia. It seemed to belong to another time, and it was impossible not to look upon it and imagine its earlier incarnations, the importance of that link when travel between the islands and the mainland was not so easy. The mail boat brought letters and packages and freight, but it also brought, and disseminated, news. My grandfather, my mother’s father, took me on one of the mail boat’s runs shortly after my mother and I returned to Maine in the aftermath of my father’s death, as we fled north to escape the spreading stain of it. I wondered then if it might be possible for us to live on one of those islands, to leave the mainland behind forever, so that when the blood reached the limits of the coast it would drip slowly into the sea and be dispersed by the waves. Looking back, I realize that I was always running: from my father’s legacy; from the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, my wife and child; and, ultimately, from my own nature.

But now I had stopped running.

The Sailmaker was, not to put too fine a point on it, a dump. It was one of the last of the old wharf bars in Portland, the ones that were built to cater for the needs of lobstermen, dock workers, and all of those whose livelihood depended on the grittier aspects of Portland ’s working harbor. It was there long before anyone thought that tourists might want to spend time on the waterfront, and when the tourists did eventually appear they gave the Sailmaker a wide berth. It was like the dog on the street that snoozes in the yard, its fur pitted with the scars of old battles, its mouth, even in repose, always baring yellowed teeth, its eyes rheumy beneath half-closed lids, every aspect of it exuding restrained menace and promising the loss of a finger, or more, if a passing stranger were foolish enough to attempt a pat on the head. Even the name on the sign that hung outside the bar was barely legible, its paintwork ignored for years. Those who needed it knew where to find it, which was true of locals and a certain type of new arrival, the type that was not concerned with fine dining, and lighthouses, and nostalgic thoughts about mail boats and islanders. That kind sniffed out the Sailmaker and found their place in it, once they’d snapped at the other dogs, and taken their bites in return.

The Sailmaker was the only business still open on its wharf; around it, shuttered windows and padlocked doors secured premises that had nothing inside left to steal. Even to enter them would be to risk plummeting through the floor and into the cold waters beneath, for these buildings, like the wharf itself, were slowly rotting into the sea. It seemed a miracle that the whole structure had not collapsed many years before, and while the Sailmaker appeared to be more stable than its neighbors, it sat on the same uncertain pilings as they did.

So it was that drinking in the Sailmaker brought with it a sense of danger on a great many levels, the prospect of drowning in the bay due to stepping through a busted board being a relatively minor concern when compared with the more immediate threat of physical violence, serious or minor, from one or more of its customers. For the most part, even the lobstermen no longer frequented the Sailmaker, and the ones who did were less interested in fishing than in drinking steadily until fluid came out of their ears. They were lobster-men in name only, for those who ended up in the Sailmaker had resigned themselves to the fact that their days of being contributory members of society, of working hard for an honest wage, were long behind them. The Sailmaker was where you ended up when there was nowhere else left to go, when the only ending in sight was a funeral attended by people who knew you only by your seat at the bar and the drink that you ordered, and who would be mourning their own lives as much as yours as you were lowered into the ground. Every coastal town used to have a bar like the Sailmaker; in a way, the lost were more likely to be remembered in such places than they were among the remnants of their own family. In that sense, the Sailmaker was, nominally as well as figuratively, an apt venue in which to end one’s days, for it was the sailmaker on board ship who would sew the dead man up in his hammock, passing a final stitch through the nose of the departed to ensure that he was dead. At the Sailmaker, no such precautions were necessary: its patrons were drinking themselves to death, so when they stopped ordering drinks it was a pretty sure sign that they’d succeeded.

The Sailmaker was owned by a man named Jimmy Jewel, although I had never heard him called anything other than ‘Mr. Jewel’ to his face. Jimmy Jewel owned a lot of places like the Sailmaker and the wharf upon which it stood: apartment buildings that barely came up to code; ruined structures on waterfronts and side streets in towns all the way from Kittery to Calais; and vacant lots that were used for nothing but storing filthy pools of stagnating rainwater, lots that were not for sale and bore no indication of ownership beyond a series of ‘No Trespassing’ signs, some of them reasonably official in appearance, others just scrawled boards with increasingly varied and creative spellings of the word ‘Trespassing.’

What these buildings and lots had in common was the possibility that they might, at some future date, be valuable to a developer. The wharf on which the Sailmaker sat was one of a number tipped to become part of the new Maine State Pier redevelopment, a $160 million effort to revitalize the commercial waterfront involving a new hotel, soaring offices, and a cruise ship terminal which had since been dropped and now looked to be an increasingly distant prospect. The port was struggling. The International Marine Terminal that had once been filled with cargo containers waiting to be taken out on ships and barges, or transported inland by truck and train, was quieter than it had ever been. The number of fishing boats bringing their catches to the fish exchange on the Portland Fish Pier had fallen from 350 to 70 in the space of fifteen years, and the livelihoods of the fishermen were being threatened further by a reduction in their number of permitted fishing days. The high-speed Cat service between Portland and Nova Scotia was ending, taking with it much needed jobs and income for the port. Some were suggesting that the survival of the waterfront depended on increasing the number of bars and restaurants permitted on the wharfs, but the danger was that the port would then become little more than a theme park, with a handful of lobstermen left to eke out a meager living and provide some local color for the tourists, leaving Portland just a shadow of the great deep-water harbor that had defined the city’s identity for three centuries.

And in the middle of all this uncertainty squatted Jimmy Jewel, sizing up the angles, his finger damp and raised to the wind. It wouldn’t be true to say that Jimmy didn’t care about Portland, or its piers, or its history. He just cared about money more.

But decaying buildings, although a significant part of his portfolio, did not represent the sum total of Jimmy’s business interests. He had a slice of interstate and cross-border trucking, and he knew more about the smuggling of narcotics than almost anyone on the northeastern seaboard. Jimmy’s main deal was pot, but he’d suffered a couple of serious hits in recent years, and now he was rumored to be taking a step back from the drug business in favor of more legitimate enterprises, or those enterprises that gave the appearance of legitimacy, which was not the same thing. Old habits died hard, and when it came to criminality Jimmy kept his hand in as much for the money as for the pleasure he got in breaking the law.

I didn’t have to call ahead to make an appointment with him. The heart of Jimmy’s empire was the Sailmaker. He had a small office in back, but it was used mainly for storage. Instead, Jimmy could always be found at the bar, reading newspapers, answering occasional calls on an ancient phone, and drinking endless cups of coffee. He was there when I entered that morning. There was nobody else with him, apart from a bartender in a stained white t-shirt who was hauling in crates of beer from the storeroom. The bartender’s name was Earle Hanley, the same Earle Hanley who had tended bar at the Blue Moon on the night that Sally Cleaver was beaten to death by her boyfriend, for the owner of the Sailmaker and the Blue Moon were one and the same: Jimmy Jewel.

Earle looked up as I came in. If he liked what he saw, he made a manly effort to disguise the fact. His face creased, wrinkling like a ball of paper that had just been squeezed hard, and, even in repose, Earle’s face already resembled the last walnut in the bowl a week after Thanksgiving. He doubled as one of the guys who occasionally doled out beatings to recalcitrants who crossed Jimmy and incurred his displeasure. He appeared to have been constructed from a series of balls of encrusted lipids, the topmost fringed with greasy black hair. Even his thighs were circular. I could almost hear the fats sluicing around in his body as he moved.

Jimmy, meanwhile, wore a mortician’s black suit over an open-collared blue shirt. He was thin, and his hair was varying shades of gray held in place with a pomade that smelled faintly of cloves. He was six feet tall, but slightly stooped, so that he seemed to be struggling under some burden invisible to all, but deeply oppressive to himself. The right-hand side of his mouth was permanently raised, as if life were some amusing comedy and he was merely a spectator. Jimmy wasn’t a bad guy, as smugglers and drug dealers went. He’d knocked heads a couple of times with my grandfather, who was a state cop and knew Jimmy from way back, but they had respected each other. Jimmy had come to my grandfather’s funeral, and the grief he had expressed to me was genuine. Since then, I had enjoyed few dealings with him, but our paths had crossed on occasion, and once or twice he’d been good enough to point me in the right direction when I had a question that needed to be answered, as long as nobody got hurt by it and the law didn’t get involved.

He looked up from his newspaper, and that semi-smile flickered, like a lightbulb that has suffered a momentary disturbance to its power supply.

‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a mask?’ he asked.

‘Why? You got anything worth stealing?’

‘No, but I thought all you avengers wore masks. That way people can say “Who was that masked avenger?” as you vanish into the night. Otherwise, you’re just a guy who dresses too young for his age, sticking his nose where he’s got no business sticking it, and looking surprised when it gets bloodied.’

I took a stool across from him. He sighed and folded his newspaper.

‘You think I dress too young for my age?’ I said.

‘You ask me, everybody dresses too young these days, when they get dressed at all. I can still remember a time when there were hookers in these bars, and even they wouldn’t have dressed like some of the young girls I see passing by, summer and winter. I want to buy them all coats, make sure they wrap up warm. But what do I know from fashion? I think any suit that isn’t black looks like something Liberace would wear.’ He stretched out a hand, and we shook. ‘How you doing, kid?’

‘Pretty good.’

‘You still with that woman?’ he asked. He meant Rachel, the mother of my daughter, Sam. I didn’t feel any urge to express surprise. Nobody survived for as long as Jimmy Jewel without keeping tabs on whomever crossed his path.

‘No. We broke up. She’s in Vermont.’

‘She take the kid with her?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

This wasn’t a topic of conversation I wanted to pursue. I sniffed warily at the air.

‘Your bar stinks,’ I said.

‘My bar smells fine,’ said Jimmy. ‘It’s my clientele that stink, but to get rid of the stink I’d have to get rid of them, and then it would just be me and my ghosts. Oh, and Earle doesn’t smell so good either, but that may be genetic.’

Earle didn’t reply, but just added a few more wrinkles to his expression and went back to rearranging the dirt.

‘You want a drink? It’s on the house.’

‘I don’t think so. I hear you water your booze down to add taste.’

‘You got balls, coming in here and insulting my place.’

‘It’s not a “place,” it’s a tax write-off. If it ever made any real money, your empire would collapse.’

‘I have an empire? I never knew. I did, I’d have dressed better, bought more expensive black suits.’

‘You have a guy who brings you coffee without being asked, and breaks heads on the same basis. I guess that counts for something.’

‘So, you want some coffee, then?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Is it as bad as everything else in here?’

‘Worse, but I made it myself so at least you know my hands are clean. Literally, not metaphorically.’

‘Coffee would be good, thanks. It’s kind of early for me otherwise.’

‘Then you’re in the wrong place. You think the windows are small because I couldn’t afford the glass?’

The Sailmaker was always dark. Its customers didn’t care to be reminded about the passage of time.

Jimmy gestured to to Earle, who stood, retrieved a mug from somewhere, examined its insides to make sure that it wasn’t too dirty, or was just dirty enough, and poured. When he put the mug down on the bar, coffee slopped over the sides and pooled on the wood. Earle looked at me, as though daring me to complain.

‘He’s dainty for a big man,’ I said.

‘He doesn’t like you,’ said Jimmy. ‘Don’t take it personal, though: he doesn’t like anyone. Sometimes I think that he doesn’t even like me, but I pay him, so that buys me a degree of tolerance.’

Jimmy passed me a silver jug of milk, not cream, and a bowl of sugar. Jimmy didn’t like UHT milk, or cheap creamer, or sachets of sweetener. I took the milk, not the sugar.

‘So, is this a social call, or have I done a great wrong that needs to be righted? Because I got to tell you, having you in my place makes me feel like checking my insurance.’

‘You think trouble follows me?’

‘Jesus, Death himself probably sends you a fruit basket at Christmas, thanking you for the business.’

‘I have a question about trucking.’

‘Don’t get into it, that’s my advice. Long hours, no overtime. You’ll sleep in a cab, eat bad food, and die at a rest stop. On the other hand, nobody will actively try to kill you, which seems to be one of the occupational hazards of your line of work, or the version of it that you pursue.’

I ignored the career advice. ‘There’s a guy, an independent. He’s got payments to keep up on a nice rig, a mortgage, the usual stuff. I’d say, overall, his expenses come close to seventy grand a year, and that’s not leading an extravagant lifestyle.’

‘That allowing for some massage on the figures?’

‘Probably. You ever met an honest man?’

‘Not when it comes to taxes. I did, I’d take him for every penny he was worth, just like the IRS, but not as vindictive. This guy, he do long haul?’

‘Some Canadian stuff, but that’s it, I think.’

‘ Canada ’s a big place. How far are we talking?’

‘ Quebec, as far as I know.’

‘That’s not long haul. He work a lot of hours?’

‘Not enough, or that would be my take on it.’

‘So you figure he might be doing a little work on the side?’

‘He’s crossing the border. The thought had struck me. And, with respect, I don’t think squirrels cross the border without you knowing it and taking ten percent of their nuts.’

‘Fifteen,’ said Jimmy. ‘And that’s the friends’ rate. This guy have a name?’

‘Joel Tobias.’

Jimmy looked away, and clicked his tongue.

‘He’s not one of mine.’

‘You know whose he might be?’

Jimmy didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said: ‘What’s your interest in him?’

On my way to Portland, I had debated how much I was prepared to tell Jimmy. In the end, I decided that I was going to have to tell him most of it, but I wanted to leave out Damien Patchett’s death for now.

‘He’s got a girlfriend,’ I said. ‘A concerned citizen thinks he may not be treating her right, and that she’d be better off away from him.’

‘And what? You prove he’s smuggling and she tosses him aside and dates a preacher instead? Either you’re lying, and I don’t believe you’d come in here and do that, or this concerned citizen needs a lesson in the ways of the world. Half the girls in this town will jump on a guy with a nickel in his pocket and wear him down to a stub, and they won’t care where the money came from. In fact, you tell them you got it illegally, and some of them will call their sisters to join in as well.’

‘What about the other half?’

‘They’ll just steal his wallet. Short-term goals, short-term gains.’ He rubbed his face with his hand, and I heard the crackle of his stubble. ‘I know you’re not the kind to take advice, but maybe you’ll listen to me for the sake of your grandfather,’ he continued. ‘This one isn’t worth it, not if it’s just about some domestic situation that’ll resolve itself one way or the other. Let it go. There’s easier money out there.’

I drank some coffee. It tasted like sump oil. If I hadn’t watched him pour it, I’d have said that Earle had gone in back and dipped the mug in the bay before giving it to me. Then again, maybe he just kept a couple of really nasty mugs and glasses to one side, for special visitors.

‘It doesn’t work that way, Jimmy,’ I said.

‘Yeah, I figured I was talking to the breeze.’

‘So you know about Tobias?’

‘You first. This isn’t just about a girl dating the wrong guy.’

‘I’ve been hired by someone who figures he’s dirty, and may have a grudge against him.’

‘And you came to me because you figure Tobias is augmenting his cargo illegally to make ends meet, and I’d know about it if he was.’

‘Jimmy, you know about stuff even God doesn’t know about.’

‘That’s because God is only interested in his own cut, and we all pay that, eventually, so God can afford to wait. I, on the other hand, am always seeking to expand.’

‘So, Joel Tobias.’

Jimmy shrugged. ‘I don’t have much to tell you about this guy, but what I do have you won’t like…’

Jimmy knew the ways of the border. He was familiar with every road, every inlet, every secluded cove in the state of Maine. He worked for himself largely in the sense that he was an agent for a number of criminal organizations who were often happy to remain at one remove from the illegal activities that funded them. Booze, drugs, people, money: whatever needed to be transported, Jimmy would find a way to do it. Longstanding bribes were in place, and there were men in uniform who knew when to look the other way. He used to say that he had more people on his payroll than the government, and his jobs were more secure.

The events of 9/11 changed things for Jimmy and others like him. Border security was tightened, and Jimmy was no longer able to guarantee deliveries without a hitch. The bribes grew larger, and some of his inside men quietly told Jimmy that they couldn’t take the risk of working for him anymore. A couple of shipments were seized, and the people whose goods he was transporting weren’t happy about it. Jimmy lost money, and clients. But the economic downturn had also helped some: cash was scarce, jobs were disappearing, and under those circumstances, smuggling seemed like a pretty good option to men who were struggling to weather hard times. But even though Jimmy was always in need of good help, he was careful about those whom he employed. He wanted people who could be trusted, who wouldn’t show signs of panic when the dogs began sniffing around their trucks or their cars, who wouldn’t decide to take a chance on ripping Jimmy off and making a run for it with the proceeds. Only newbies did stuff like that. The older ones knew better. Jimmy might have seemed like a genial guy, but Earle wasn’t. Earle would break a kitten’s legs for spilling its milk.

And if Earle couldn’t handle the situation, which was rare, Jimmy had friends everywhere, the kind of friends who owed him and knew where to look for anyone dumb enough to cross Jimmy Jewel. And since newbies only got consignments to transport worth a low-five-figure sum at most, there was a limit to how far any of them could run, assuming they could access the ‘traps’, the hidden storage compartments, to begin with. Even those who did run inevitably ended up back where they came from, because Jimmy also made sure that he employed people who had friends and family within easy reach. Either the offending parties would return of their own volition, largely because they missed the company, or they would be encouraged to return in order to avoid trouble for those close to them. Then a beating would follow, and a sequestration of assets or, in the absence of any such assets, a couple of risky, dirty jobs done for little or no payment as a gesture of atonement. Jimmy resisted punishments that were terminal as they drew unwanted attention to his operations, but that wasn’t to say that people had not died for crossing Jimmy Jewel. There were bodies buried in the Great North Woods, but Jimmy hadn’t put them there. It was just that, sometimes, clients emerged who resented the disruption caused to their affairs by someone running off with their cash or their drugs, and who insisted upon an example being made pour décourager autres, as some of his Quebeçois contacts liked to put it. In such cases, Jimmy did his best to plead for leniency, but if his pleas fell on deaf ears, Jimmy had always made it clear that he wasn’t about to cap anyone, because that wasn’t the way he worked, and the finger on the trigger wouldn’t belong to any of his people. Nobody ever complained about Jimmy’s position on this matter, mainly because there were always men who were happy to dim some unfortunate’s lights, if only to keep themselves fresh and in the game.

Jimmy never put pressure on anyone to work for him. He was content to make a delicate approach, sometimes through a third party, and, if that approach was rebuffed, to move on elsewhere. He was patient. Often, it was enough to sow the seed and wait for a change in financial circumstances to occur, at which point his offer might be reconsidered. But he kept tabs on the local truckers, and he was always listening up for rumors of excessive cash being thrown around, or someone picking up a new rig when common sense would suggest that he should barely have been able to maintain the old one. If there was one thing Jimmy didn’t care for, it was competition, or smart guys trying to run independent operations, however small in scale. There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn’t about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Colombians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product, he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the Sailmaker with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren’t among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears.

That was how Joel Tobias had come to Jimmy’s attention. He had a rig, a truck, a house, but he wasn’t making the kind of runs that would enable him to keep them all for long. The figures didn’t add up, and Jimmy had begun to make some gentle inquiries, because if Tobias was smuggling drugs then those drugs had both to come from somewhere and to go somewhere, once they’d crossed the border, and there were only a limited number of possible options in either case. Booze was unwieldy, and didn’t bring in enough dough for the risk, and as far as Jimmy could tell Tobias was using the monitored crossings, which meant that he’d be subject to regular searches, and unless he was being provided with some very high-class documentation his career as a booze smuggler would be short. That left cash, but, again, large dollar amounts had to come from somewhere, and Jimmy had cornered the market in that particular specialty. Anyway, the actual physical movement of cash was also a very minor part of his operation, as there were easier ways to transport money from place to place than in the trunk of a car or the cab of a truck. So Jimmy was very curious indeed about Joel Tobias, which is why he decided to approach him directly one day when Tobias was drinking alone over at Three Dollar Dewey’s after making a legitimate delivery to a warehouse on Commercial. It was four in the afternoon, so the evening rush hadn’t yet hit Dewey’s. Jimmy and Earle joined Tobias at the bar, one on either side of him, and asked if they could buy him a drink.

‘I’m good,’ said Tobias, and went back to reading his magazine.

‘Just trying to be friendly,’ said Jimmy.

Tobias had glanced at Earle in response. ‘Yeah? Your buddy has friendly written all over him.’ Earle had friendly written all over him the way that a plague rat had ‘Hug Me’ emblazoned on its fur.

Tobias didn’t appear disturbed or frightened. He was a big guy; not as big as Earle, but better toned. Jimmy knew, from asking around, that Tobias was ex-military. He’d served in Iraq, and his left hand looked chewed up, missing the little finger and its nearest neighbor, but he was in good condition, so it appeared that he’d maintained the habits that he’d learned in the army. He’d also kept up with his old buddies, from what Jimmy could ascertain, which concerned him slightly. Whatever scam Tobias was running, he wasn’t running it alone. Soldiers, former or otherwise, meant guns, and Jimmy didn’t like guns.

‘He’s a pussycat,’ said Jimmy. ‘I’m the one you should be worried about.’

‘Look, I’m having a beer and reading. Why don’t you take Igor here and go scare some kids? I’ve got nothing to talk to you about.’

‘You know who I am?’ asked Jimmy.

Tobias took a sip of his beer, but didn’t look at him. ‘Yeah, I know who you are.’

‘Then you know why I’m here.’

‘I don’t need the work. I’m doing okay.’

‘Better than okay, from what I hear. You drive a sharp rig. You’re making your payments, and you got enough left over to buy a beer at the end of a hard day’s work. You ask me, you’re rocking and rolling.’

‘Like you said, I work hard.’

‘Seems to me that you’d need thirty hours in the day to make the kind of money that you’re pulling down in these difficult times. Independent operator, competing with the big guys. Hell, you mustn’t ever sleep.’ Tobias said nothing. He finished his beer, folded the magazine, and took most of his change from the bar, leaving a dollar tip.

‘You need to let this go,’ he said.

‘You need to show some respect,’ said Jimmy.

Tobias looked at him with a degree of amusement.

‘Nice talking to you,’ he said as he got up. Earle reached for him to force him back down, but Tobias was too fast for him. He spun away from Earle, then kicked him hard in the side of the left knee. Earle’s leg buckled, and Tobias grabbed Earle’s hair as he went down and banged Earle’s head hard against the bar. Earle slumped to the floor, stunned.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ said Tobias. ‘You mind your own business, and I’ll mind mine.’

Jimmy nodded, but it wasn’t a conciliatory gesture, merely an indication that a suspicion had now been confirmed for him.

‘Drive safely,’ he said.

Tobias backed out. Earle, who was nursing his knee but had recovered his composure, seemed inclined to take matters further when Jimmy put a hand on his shoulder to quieten him.

‘Let him go,’ he said, as he watched Tobias depart. ‘This is just the beginning.’

Back in the Sailmaker, Earle was doing a good job of pretending not to listen to our conversation.

‘Tobias hurt his professional pride,’ said Jimmy.

‘Yeah, well, I’m all torn up about that.’

‘You should be. Earle doesn’t forget a hurt.’

I watched the big man cleaning the bar, even though there were no customers, and the Sailmaker wasn’t about to get any cleaner without dousing its surfaces with acid. In that way, it had a lot in common with the Blue Moon.

‘He didn’t do a day’s time for what happened to Sally Cleaver,’ I said. ‘Maybe a couple of years in the can might have made him a little less sensitive.’

‘He was younger then,’ said Jimmy. ‘He’d handle it differently now.’

‘Won’t bring her back.’

‘No, it won’t. You’re a harsh judge, Charlie. People got the right to change, to learn from their mistakes.’

He was right, and I wasn’t in a position to point the finger, although I didn’t like admitting it.

‘Why do you let that place stand?’ I said.

‘The Moon? Sentimentality, maybe. It was my first bar. A shithole, but they’re all shitholes. I know my place, and I know my customers.’

‘And?’

‘It’s a reminder. For me, for Earle. We take it away, and we start to forget.’

‘You know anything about Jandreau, the state trooper who died there?’

‘No, and I already answered all the questions the cops had to throw at me about that. Last time I looked, you weren’t wearing a badge, not unless it read “Inquisitive Asshole.”’

‘And Tobias?’

‘It looks like he decided to keep a low profile after I spoke to him. He didn’t make any runs outside the state for a month. Now he’s started again.’

‘Any idea of destinations on the Canadian side?’

‘All standard runs: some animal feed; paper products; machine parts. I could probably get you a list, but it wouldn’t help. They’re straight operations. Either I started asking questions too late, or these people are cleverer than they seem.’

‘People? We’re talking associates?’

‘Some army buddies. They’ve gone on runs with him. Shouldn’t be hard for a man of your talents to find them.’ He picked up his newspaper and began reading. Our conversation had come to an end. ‘It was good talking to you again, Charlie. I’m sure you don’t need Earle to show you out.’

I stood up and put on my jacket.

‘What’s he moving, Jimmy?’

Jimmy’s mouth creased, and the right side raised itself to mirror the left, forming a crocodile smile.

‘That matter is in hand. Maybe I’ll let you know how it works out…’

7

Did I trust Jimmy Jewel? I wasn’t sure. My grandfather once described him as the kind of man who would lie through omission, but who preferred not to lie at all. Naturally, Jimmy made an exception for US customs and the forces of law and order in general, but even where they were concerned he tended to avoid confrontations wherever possible, thereby obviating the necessity for untruths.

But it was now clear, from what I had been told, that Joel Tobias was on Jimmy Jewel’s radar, which was a little like being tracked by a military drone aircraft: it might just soar above you for the most part, but you never knew when it would call down vengeance upon your head.

After checking that Tobias’s rig remained at the warehouse, and that his Silverado was still parked at his house, I stopped for a bowl of gumbo at the Bayou Kitchen on Deering. Jimmy had said that Joel Tobias was being helped by former soldiers, which brought with it a whole new set of problems. Maine was a veterans’ state: there were more than 150,000 veterans living here, and that wasn’t counting the ones who had been called up again to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them lived away from the cities, holed up in rural areas like the County. In my experience, a lot of them didn’t care much for talking to outsiders about their activities, legal or otherwise.

I made a call to Jackie Garner from my table, and told him that I had some work for him. Despite being well into his forties, Jackie still lived with his mom, who evinced a benign tolerance for her son’s love of homemade explosives and other improvised munitions, although he was under strict instructions not to bring them into the house. Lately, a degree of tension had crept into this cozily Oedipal relationship, precipitated by the fact that Jackie had begun to date a woman named Lisa, who seemed very fond of her new beau, and was pressing him to move in with her, even if it wasn’t yet clear how much she knew about the whole munitions business. Jackie’s mother regarded the new arrival as unwanted competition for her son’s affections, and had recently begun to play the frail, ageing, ‘Who-will-look-after-me-when-you’re-gone?’ role, one into which she did not easily fit as there were great white sharks less well equipped for the solitary life than Mrs. Garner.

Thus it was that Jackie, caught between these twin poles of affection, like a condemned man whose arms have been attached to a pair of draft horses with a whip braced over their withers, seemed grateful for my call, and was more than willing to take on some otherwise dull surveillance work that did not involve dealing with the women in his life. I told him to stay with Joel Tobias, but if Tobias met up with anyone, then he was to follow the second party. In the meantime, I planned to talk with Ronald Straydeer, a Penobscot Indian who had his finger on veterans’ affairs, and might be able to tell me a little more about Tobias.

But for now I had other obligations: Dave Evans had asked me to come in and cover for him for the weekly beer delivery at the Bear, and then act as bar manager for the rest of the day. It would be a long shift, but Dave was in a hole, so I put Ronald Straydeer off until the next day, then headed down to the Bear in time to meet the Nappi truck. And because the Bear was busy, afternoon slipped quickly into evening, and then into night, with barely a change to the bar’s dimly lit interior, until at last it was after midnight, and I heard my bed calling.

They were waiting for me in the parking lot. There were three of them, all wearing black ski masks and dark jackets. I caught a glimpse of one of them as I was opening my car door, but by then they were on top of me. I lashed out with my right hand, catching someone a glancing blow to the face with my elbow. I followed through with the car key, and felt it cut through the mask and tear the skin beneath. I heard swearing, and then I took a hard blow to the back of the head that sent me sprawling. A gun was placed against my temple, and a male voice said: ‘Enough.’ A car pulled up. Hands were placed beneath my armpits, dragging me to my feet. A sack was forced over my head, and I was pushed into the back of the car and made to lie flat on the floor. One booted foot was placed against the back of my neck. My hands were pulled behind my back, and seconds later I felt the plastic restraints tighten painfully against my skin. Gunmetal tapped me lightly on the same spot where I had earlier been struck, and sparks went off behind my eyes.

‘Stay down, and stay quiet.’

And with no further choice in the matter, I did as I was told.

We headed south on I-95. I could tell from the distance we traveled on Forest, and the turn we made on to the interstate. We drove for no more than fifteen minutes before pulling off to the left. I heard gravel crunch beneath the tires as we came to a halt, and then I was pulled from the car. My arms were forced high behind my back, almost to the point of dislocation, and I was made to walk bent over. Nobody spoke. A door opened. Through the sack I could smell old smoke and urine. I was pushed inside, helped by a boot in the ass that sent me to the floor. Someone laughed. There were rough tiles beneath me, and the smell of human waste was nauseatingly strong. My captors took up positions around me. Their footsteps echoed. I was indoors, but the sound was wrong, and I had a sense of space above my head. In fact, I now had a pretty good idea of where I was. Even after all these years, the place still smelled of burning. I was at the Blue Moon, and I understood that a connection had been made between Jimmy Jewel and me. Those who had brought me to this place knew about our meeting, and they had decided, wrongly, that I was in Jimmy’s employ. A message was about to be sent to Jimmy through me, and even before they began communicating it I was certain that I would have preferred it to be delivered to Jimmy in person.

Someone knelt beside me, and the sack was pulled up as far as my nose.

‘We don’t want to hurt you.’ It was the same male voice that had spoken earlier. It was calm and measured, the voice of a younger man, and without animosity.

‘Maybe you should have thought that one through before you knocked me down in the parking lot,’ I said.

‘You were pretty fast with that key. Seemed like a good idea to quieten you down some. Anyway, enough with the pleasantries. Answer my questions, and you’ll be back at your muscle car before the headache really starts to bite. You know what this is about.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes, you do. Why are you following Joel Tobias?’

‘Who’s Joel Tobias?’

There was silence for a time before the voice came again, closer now. I could smell mint on the man’s breath.

‘We know all about you. You’re a big shot, running around with a gun, putting bad guys in the ground. Don’t get me wrong: I admire you and what you’ve done. You’re on the right side, and that counts for something. It’s why you’re still breathing instead of sinking into the marshes with a new hole in your head to let the water in. I’ll ask you one more time: why are you following Joel Tobias? Who hired you? Is Jimmy Jewel picking up the tab? Speak now, or you’ll be forever holding your tongue.’

My head ached, and my arms hurt. Something sharp was biting into my palm. I could just have told them that Bennett Patchett had hired me because he believed that Joel Tobias was abusing his girlfriend. I could have, but I didn’t. It wasn’t simply out of concern for Bennett’s own safety; there was an element of stubbornness to it too. Then again, sometimes stubbornness and principle are almost indistinguishable from each other.

‘Like I said, I don’t know any Joel Tobias.’

‘Strip him,’ said another voice. ‘Strip him and cornhole him.’

‘You hear that?’ said the first voice. ‘Some of my buddies here aren’t as concerned about the niceties of conversation as I am. I could step outside to smoke a cigarette, and leave them to amuse themselves with you.’ A blade touched my buttocks, and glanced against my groin. Even through my trousers, I felt the keenness of its edge. ‘Is that what you want? You’ll be a changed man after it, that’s for sure. In fact, you’ll be a bitch.’

‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I said, and I sounded braver than I felt.

‘You’re a fool, Mr. Parker. You’re going to tell us the truth within the next minute. I guarantee you.’

He let the sack drop down over my nose and mouth. Hands grabbed my legs, and I heard the sticky rasp of heavy-duty tape before it was wound tightly around my calves. The sack was twisted tightly against my Adam’s apple. Then I was lifted and carried across the room. I was turned so that I was facing up, and then my legs were raised higher than my head.

The voice spoke again.

‘You’re not going to like this,’ it said, ‘and I’d prefer not to have to do it, but needs must.’

I could just about breathe through the material, but I was already hyperventilating. I tried to bring my breathing under control, counting slowly from one to ten in my head. I got as far as three before I smelled fetid water, and then I was plunged headfirst below its surface.

I tried to resist the urge to inhale, tried to hold my breath entirely, but a finger probed for my solar plexus and then began placing steady pressure on it. Water flooded into my nose and mouth. I started to choke. Then I began to drown. It wasn’t just a sensation of drowning: my head was filling with water. When I inhaled, the cloth tightened against my face, and I took in fluid. When I tried to cough it away more water flooded my throat. I began to lose track of whether I was inhaling or exhaling, of what was up and what was down. I was certain that I was on the verge of blacking out when they pulled me out and laid me on the floor. The sack was yanked away from the lower half of my face. I was turned on my side and allowed to cough up water and phlegm.

‘There’s plenty more where that came from, Mr. Parker,’ said my interrogator, for that was what he was: my interrogator and my torturer. ‘Who hired you? Why were you meeting with Jimmy Jewel?’

‘I don’t work for Jimmy Jewel.’ I gasped out the words.

‘Then why did you go to his place today?’

‘It was just a casual meeting. Look, I-’

The sack was pulled back down, and I was lifted and immersed, lifted and immersed, but there were no more questions, no opportunities to make it stop, and I believed that I was going to die. When I went down for the fourth time, I would have told them anything to bring it to an end, anything at all. I thought that I heard someone say, ‘You’re killing him,’ but there was no anxiety about the fact. It was merely an observation.

I was raised from the water and lowered to the floor again, but I still felt as though I were drowning. The sack was pressed against my nose and mouth, and I couldn’t breathe. I thrashed on the floor like a dying fish, trying to push the sack away, not caring as I scraped my face against the floor through the material. At last, mercifully, it was pulled up. I had to force myself to inhale, for my system seemed to have shut down in expectation of water, not air. Facedown, I felt hands pushing at my back, forcing the fluid from me. It seared my throat and nostrils as it emerged, as though it were acid, not filthy water.

‘Jesus,’ said the same voice that had earlier commented on the possibility of my death, ‘he pretty much swallowed half the barrel.’

The first man spoke again. ‘For the last time, Mr. Parker: who hired you to follow Joel Tobias?’

‘No more,’ I said, and I hated the pleading tone of my voice. I was broken. ‘No more…’

‘Just be straight with us. But this is your last chance: the next time, we’ll leave you to drown.’

‘Bennett Patchett,’ I said. I was ashamed at my weakness, but I didn’t want to go under again. I didn’t want to die that way. I coughed again, but less water emerged this time.

‘Damien’s father,’ came a third voice, one that I had not heard before. It was deeper than the rest, the voice of a black man. He sounded tired. ‘He’s talking about Damien’s father.’

‘Why?’ said the first voice again. ‘Why did he hire you.’

‘He employs Joel Tobias’s girlfriend. He was concerned about her. He thought Tobias might be beating her.’

‘You’re lying.’

I felt him reach for the sack again, and I pulled away.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s the truth. Bennett’s a good man. He was just worried about the girl.’

‘Shit,’ said the black man. ‘All this because Joel can’t keep his old lady in line.’

‘Quiet! Did the girl say something to Patchett to make him think this?’

‘No. They’re his own suspicions, nothing more.’

‘There’s more to it than that, though, isn’t there? Tell me. We’ve come this far. It’s nearly over now.’

I had no dignity left. ‘He wants to know why his son died.’

‘Damien shot himself. The “why” won’t bring him back.’

‘That’s hard for Bennett to accept. He’s lost his boy, his only son. He’s hurting.’

For a time, nothing else was said, and I experienced the first glimmer of hope that I might yet come out of this alive and, perhaps, that Bennett would not suffer for my weakness.

The interrogator leaned in close to me. His breath was warm against my cheek, and I felt the terrible intimacy that is part of the pact between the tormented and the tormentor. ‘Why did you follow Tobias to his rig?’

I swore. If Tobias had made that tail too, I was more out of practice than I thought. ‘Patchett doesn’t like him, and he wanted evidence to present to the girl that might make her leave him. I thought that maybe he might be seeing someone else on the side. That was why I followed him.’

‘And Jimmy Jewel?’

‘Tobias drives a truck. Jimmy Jewel knows the trucking business.’

‘Jimmy Jewel knows smuggling.’

‘He told me that he tried to recruit Tobias, but Tobias didn’t bite. That’s all I know.’

He considered this. ‘It almost sounds plausible,’ he said. ‘Sleazy, but plausible. I’m tempted to give you the benefit of the doubt, except that I know you’re an intelligent man. You’re inquisitive. I’m pretty certain that Joel Tobias’s sexual habits were not the only branch of his affairs that you might have been tempted to examine.’

I could see his boots through the gap at the bottom of the sack. They were shiny and black. I watched as they moved away from me. A conversation was conducted nearby in tones too soft for me to pick up on what was being said. Instead, I concentrated on breathing. I was shaking, and my throat was raw. Eventually, I heard footsteps approaching, and those black boots appeared in my field of vision again.

‘Now you listen, Mr. Parker. The girl’s welfare isn’t anything that you need to concern yourself with. She’s in no danger, I guarantee you. There will be no further repercussions for you, or Mr. Patchett, as long as you both just walk away. I give you my word on that. Nobody is being hurt here, do you understand? Nobody. Whatever you suspect, or think you know, you’re wrong.’

‘Your word as a soldier?’ I said. I sensed him react, and braced myself for the blow, but none came.

‘I guessed that you’d be a smartass,’ he said. ‘Don’t get any ideas. I’m sure that you’re all riled up, or you will be once we let you go, and you’ll be tempted to come looking for payback, but I wouldn’t if I were you. You come after us because of this, and we’ll kill you. This is none of your concern. I repeat: this is none of your concern. I regret what had to be done here tonight, I truly do. We’re not animals, and if you’d cooperated at the start then it wouldn’t have been necessary. Consider it a lesson hard learned.’ He pulled the sack back down. ‘We’re done here. Take him back to his car, and treat him gently.’

The tape was cut from my legs. I was helped to my feet and escorted to the car. I was disoriented and weak, and I had to stop halfway to throw up. Hands held me tight at the elbows, but at least I wasn’t being made to walk bent over with my arms raised behind my back. This time, I was put in the trunk, not the back of the car. When we got to the Bear, I was laid facedown on the parking lot, and my restraints were removed. My car keys jangled as they landed beside me. The voice that had earlier spoken of Joel Tobias’s old lady told me to keep my head covered for a count of ten. I remained where I was until the car pulled away, then raised myself slowly and stumbled to the edge of the lot. I could see the rear lights of a car racing away. Red, I thought. Maybe a Ford. Too far to make out the plates.

The Bear was dark, and my car was the only vehicle still in the lot. I didn’t call the cops. I didn’t call anybody, not then. Instead, I drove home, fighting nausea all the way. My shirt and jeans were filthy and torn. I threw them in the trash as soon as I reached the house. I wanted to shower, to clean the dirt of the Blue Moon from my skin, but I elected simply to scrub myself in the sink. I wasn’t ready for the sensation of water pouring onto my face again.

That night, I woke up twice when the sheets touched my face, and I lashed out at them in panic. After the second time, I chose to sleep on top of, not under, them, and lay awake as my mind shuffled names like cards: Damien Patchett, Jimmy Jewel, Joel Tobias. I replayed in my head the voices I had heard, the sense of humiliation I had felt as they threatened me with rape, so that I would know them when I heard them again. I let anger course through me like an electrical charge.

You should have killed me. You should have left me to drown in that water. Because now I’m going to come after you, and I’m not going to do it alone. The men I’ll bring with me will be worth a dozen of you, military training or not. Whatever you’re doing, whatever operation you’re running, I’m going to tear it apart and leave you to die in the wreckage.

For what you did to me, I’m going to kill you all.

8

The body of Jeremiah Webber had been discovered by his beloved daughter after he failed to make a lunch appointment with her, a meeting dictated at least as much by the desire to hit on her old man for a few bucks and a good meal as the child’s natural affection for her parent. Suzanne Webber loved her father, but he was a curious man, and her mother had hinted that his financial affairs did not bear close scrutiny. His shortcomings as a husband were merely one aspect of his flawed nature; as far as his first ex-wife was concerned, he could not be trusted to behave properly under any circumstances, with the exception of ensuring his daughter’s wellbeing. In that, at least, she could be certain that he would act according to what passed for his better nature. And, as has been said before, she liked Jeremiah Webber. His second ex-wife, who had no residual affection for him whatsoever, regarded him as a reptile.

When his daughter found her father’s body lying on the kitchen floor, her first thought was that there had been a robbery, or an assault. Then she saw the gun by his hand, and, given the implied precariousness of his financial circumstances, wondered if he had taken his own life. Although in shock, she had retained sufficient self-possession to use her cell phone to call the police, and not to touch anything in the room. She then spoke to her mother while she waited for the police to arrive. She sat outside, not inside. The smell in the house distressed her. It was the stink of her father’s mortality, and something else, something that she could not quite place. Later, she would describe it to her mother as the lingering stench of matches that had been lit in an effort to disguise the aftermath of a bad trip to the restroom. She smoked a cigarette, and cried, and listened as her mother, through her own tears, denied the possibility that Webber had shot himself.

‘He was selfish,’ she said, ‘but he wasn’t that selfish.’

It quickly became apparent to the investigating detectives that Jeremiah Webber had not, in fact, taken his own life, not unless he was a perfectionist who, having botched the first shot, had found the will and strength to pop a second one in his head in order to finish the job. Given the angle of entry, that would also have required him to be a contortionist, and possibly superhuman, considering the nature of the catastrophic injuries inflicted by the first bullet. So it looked like Jeremiah Webber had been murdered.

And yet, and yet…

There was powder residue on his hand. True, it might have been possible for his killer, or killers, to put the gun against his head and apply pressure to his finger in order to force him to pull the trigger, but that usually only happened in movies, and it was easier said than done. No professional was going to take the risk of putting a gun in the hands of someone who didn’t want to die. At best, there was a chance that, before he was encouraged to plant one in his own head, he might fire a shot into the ceiling, or the floor, or someone else’s head. In addition, there was no evidence of a struggle, and no marks on his body to indicate that Webber might have been restrained at some point.

So what if, suggested one of the detectives, he shot himself, botched it, and then someone else finished the job for him out of a sense of mercy? But who stands back and watches another man kill himself? Was Webber ill, or so overcome by difficulties, financial or otherwise, that he saw no way out of them but to take his own life? Had he then found someone loyal enough to stay by his side as he fired what was intended to be the fatal shot and then, having watched him fail, to deliver the coup de grâce? It seemed unlikely. Better, then, to assume that the suicide was forced upon him, that the hands of another placed Webber’s finger on the trigger and applied the pressure required to fire the first bullet into his brain, and that those same hands finished him off instead of leaving him to die in agony on his kitchen floor.

And yet, and yet…

Who tries to make a murder look like a suicide, and then undoes all that good work by firing a second shot?

An amateur, that’s who; an amateur, or someone who just doesn’t care about appearances. Then there was the matter of the wineglasses, three in all: one smashed on the floor, and the other two on the kitchen table. Both had been drunk from, and both had fingerprints upon them. No, that wasn’t quite true. Both had Webber’s fingerprints all over them, and the second glass had smears that were almost fingerprints, except that, when examined, they proved to be without whorls, or loops, or arches. They were entirely blank, leading to the suggestion that at least one other person in the room with Webber had been wearing gloves, or some form of patch to mask the prints, perhaps in an effort to put Webber at ease initially, for what kind of killer would choose to leave evidence upon a wineglass of his presence at a crime scene? The glass was sent for testing in the hope that DNA traces might be obtained from it. In time, that analysis would discover saliva which, when analyzed, revealed the presence of unusual chemical compounds: a drug of some kind. A clever lab technician, acting on little more than a hunch, separated the drug and its metabolites from the saliva using a metal-doped sol-gel immobilized in a glass capillary, and found it to be 5-fluoruoracil, or 5-FU, commonly used to treat solid tumors.

The second person in the room with Jeremiah Webber on the night that he died was thus shown to be a male on chemotherapy, which led to a possible resolution of the fingerprint issue: certain drugs used in the treatment of cancer, among them capecitabine, caused inflammation of the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, leading to peeling and blistering of the skin and, over time, the loss of fingerprints. Unfortunately, by the time this was revealed, weeks had passed since the discovery of the body, and subsequent events had played themselves out to the end.

And so, on the day after the body was discovered, the police began investigating Webber’s ex-wives, his daughter, and his business associates. In time, they would find more than one dead end, but the strangest of all was the correspondence in Webber’s files relating to an institution described as the ‘Gutelieb Foundation,’ or, more often, merely ‘the foundation,’ because the foundation did not appear to exist. The lawyers who purported to represent it were shysters with holes in their shoes, and they claimed never to have encountered in person anyone from the foundation. All bills were paid by money order, and all communication was carried out via Yahoo. The woman who took messages on the foundation’s behalf worked out of the back of a strip mall in Natick, sitting in a booth surrounded by five other women, all of them purporting to be secretaries and PAs for companies or businessmen whose offices were their cars, or their bed rooms, or a table in a coffee shop. The secretarial services company, SecServe (which the detectives investigating Webber’s death felt was a name open to misinterpretation, particularly if spoken aloud), informed the police that all bills relating to the foundation were paid, once again, by money order. SecServe had never raised any objection to this form of payment: after all, it was perfectly legitimate. Some of the company’s other clients had been known to pay in bags of quarters, and in the current climate SecServe’s boss, whose name was Obrad, was just relieved when people paid at all.

‘What kind of name is Obrad anyway?’ asked one of the detectives.

‘It is Serbian,’ said Obrad. ‘It means “to make happy.”’

He had even had it written on his business cards: OBRAD MAKE HAPPY. The cops were tempted to correct his grammar, and point out that statements like this, combined with the possibilities for misunderstanding inherent in his company name, were likely to get him into trouble at some point, but they did not. Obrad was helpful, and an enthusiast. They didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

‘And you never spoke to anyone connected with this foundation?’

Obrad shook his head. ‘Everything done on Internet now. They fill out form, forward payment, and I make happy.’ Obrad did manage to produce a copy of the original contract form filled out over the net. They traced it back to a cyber café in Providence, Rhode Island, and there the trail ended. The money orders came from a number of post offices all over New England. The same one was never used twice, and the transactions were untraceable since the US Post Office did not accept credit cards as payment for money orders. They set about seeking court orders to examine security footage from the post offices in question.

The existence of the foundation troubled the investigating officers, but post offices and internet cafés were as close as they would ever get to it. As it happened, the foundation was Herod, and it was only one of the names that he used to disguise his affairs. After Webber’s death, the foundation effectively ceased to exist. In time, Herod decided, he would reactivate it in another form. Webber had been punished, and the small community through which both men had briefly moved would be aware of the reason why. Herod was not worried about someone approaching the police. They all had something to hide, each and every one of them.

Two nights after Webber’s death, yellow tape still indicated the scene of the crime, but there was no longer a police presence at the house. The alarm system had been activated, and the local patrols made regular passes to discourage rubberneckers.

The alarm on the house went off at 12:50 a.m. The local police were at the door just as the clock tipped 1:10 a.m. The front door was closed, and all of the windows appeared to be secure. At the back of the house, they found a crow with a broken neck. It appeared to have flown into the kitchen window, activating the alarm, although neither of the cops could remember ever seeing a crow in the dead of night.

The alarm went off again at 1:30 a.m, and a third time at 1:50 a.m. The alarm company’s monitoring system indicated that, each time, the source was the kitchen window beneath which the dead crow had been found. They suspected a malfunction of some kind, which they would check in the morning. At the request of the police, the alarm was deactivated.

At 2:10 a.m., the kitchen window was opened from outside using a thin piece of metal, warped at the center so that its top half was perpendicular to its lower half, enabling it to be twisted in order to move the latch, unlocking the window. A man climbed through and alighted gently on the kitchen floor. He sniffed the air uncertainly, then lit a cigarette. Had the light been better, and had anyone been there to see him, he would have been revealed as a disheveled figure wearing an old black jacket and black trousers that nearly, but not quite, matched. His shirt might once have been white, but was now faded to a bone gray, its collar frayed. The man’s hair was long, and slicked back, revealing a pronounced widow’s peak. His teeth were yellow, as were his fingernails, all stained from decades of smoking. His movements were graceful, although it was the predatory grace of a mantid or a spider.

He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a Maglite. He pulled the drapes on the kitchen windows, twisted the top of the flashlight, and allowed its beam to play upon the table, the chairs, and the dried blood on the floor. He did not move, but simply followed the light, taking in all that it showed but touching nothing. When he had concluded his inspection of the kitchen, he progressed through the other rooms of the house, as before only looking, never touching. Finally, he returned to the kitchen, lit another cigarette from the first, and disposed of the remains of the latter in the sink. Then he retreated to the door connecting the kitchen to the hallway and leaned against the frame, trying to pinpoint the source of his unease.

The death of Webber had not come entirely as a surprise. The man in the kitchen kept a close eye on the activities of Webber and his kind. Their occasional lack of scruples did not surprise him. All collectors were the same: their desire would sometimes overcome their better natures. But Webber was not really a collector. True, he had kept some items for himself over the years, but he made his money as a middleman, a facilitator, a front for others. A certain degree of good faith was expected from such individuals. They might sometimes play one buyer off against another, but they rarely actively cheated. It was unwise to do so, for the short-term gain from a single deal handled dishonestly might well damage one’s reputation. In Webber’s case, the damage, revealed in a smear of blood and gray matter, had been fatal. The visitor took a long pull on his cigarette, his nostrils twitching. The smell that had so disturbed Webber’s daughter and which, to her shame, she associated with the relaxation of her father’s muscles after death, had faded, but the intruder’s senses were intensely acute, and largely unaffected by his love of cigarettes. The smell bothered him. It did not belong. It was alien.

Behind him was the darkness of the hallway, but it was not empty. Forms moved in the gloom, gray figures with skin like withered fruit, shapes without substance.

Hollow men.

And though he felt them gathering, he did not turn around. They were his creatures, despite their hatred for him.

The man who stood in the kitchen called himself the Collector. He sometimes went by the name of Kushiel, the demon reputed to act as Hell’s jailer, which might simply have been a dark joke on his part. He was not a collector in the manner of those for whom Webber solicited items. No, the Collector viewed himself more as a settler of debts, a striker of balances. There were some who might even have termed him a killer, for that, ultimately, was what he did, but it would have represented a misunderstanding of the work in which the Collector was engaged. Those whom he killed had, by their sins, forfeited the right to life. More to the point, their souls were forfeit, and without a soul a body was merely an empty vessel to be broken and discarded. From each one that he killed he took a token, often an item of particular sentimental value to the victim. It was his way of remembering, although he also took a considerable degree of pleasure from his collection.

And, my, how it had grown over the years.

Sometimes, those soulless beings lingered, and the Collector gave them a purpose, even if that purpose was only to add to their own number. Now, as they prowled back and forth behind him, he sensed a shift in their mood, if such lost, hopeless shells of men could be said to retain even a semblance of real human emotion other than rage. They were frightened, but it was fear tempered by an edge of…

Was that expectation?

They were like a crowd of minor playground bullies, cowed by one stronger than them but now awaiting the approach of the big dog, the lead jock, the one who would put the usurper back in his rightful place.

The Collector rarely felt uncertain. He knew too much of the ways of this honeycomb world, and he hunted in its shadows. He was the one to be feared, the predator, the judge without mercy.

But here, in this expensively appointed kitchen of a house in a wealthy suburb, the Collector was nervous. He sniffed the air again, finding the taint that lingered. He walked to the window, reached for the drapes, then paused as though fearful of what he might see on the other side. Finally, he pulled them apart, stepping back as he did so, his right hand raised slightly to protect himself.

There was only his own reflection.

But something else had been here, and not the man who had delivered the shot that killed Webber, for the Collector knew all about him: Herod, always searching, never finding; Herod, who lived behind aliases and shell companies, who was so clever and so adept at concealment that even the Collector had failed to track him down. His time would come, eventually. After all, the Collector was engaged in God’s work. He was God’s murderer, and who could hope to hide from the Divine?

No, this was not Herod. This was another, and the Collector could smell him in his nostrils and taste him on his tongue, could almost see the faintest trace of his presence like the condensation of a breath upon the glass. He had been here, watching as Webber died. Wait! The Collector’s eyes widened as he made connections, speculation hardening into belief.

Not watching Webber as he died, but watching Herod as Webber died.

The Collector knew then why he had been drawn to this place, knew why Herod had been assembling his own private collection of arcane material, even if he believed that Herod did not yet himself fully understand the final purpose behind his efforts.

He was here. He had come at last: the Laughing Man, the Old Tempter.

The One Who Waits Behind the Glass.

9

I woke feeling poorly rested, and with a deep ache in my throat, my nose, and my lungs. My right hand wouldn’t stop shaking, and hot water spilled on my shirt when I tried to make a cup of coffee. In the end, it didn’t matter about the coffee: it tasted of filthy water anyway. I sat in a chair looking over the marshes; my rage from the night before had departed, to be replaced by a lassitude that was not quite deep enough to block out my fear. I didn’t want to think about Bennett Patchett and his dead son, or Joel Tobias, or containers filled with a rushing darkness. I’d experienced delayed shock before, but never like this. Added to the pain and the fear was the shame that I felt for naming Bennett Patchett. We’d all like to believe that, in order to protect another person, and to save a little something of ourselves, we might hold out against torture, but it’s not true. Everybody breaks eventually, and to stop myself from being drowned in stagnant water I’d have told them anything that they wanted. I’d have confessed to crimes that I hadn’t committed, and promised to commit crimes repugnant to my nature. I might even have betrayed my own child, and the knowledge of that made me curl in upon myself. They had unmanned me in the ruins of the Blue Moon.

After a time, I called Bennett Patchett. Before I could speak, he told me that Karen Emory hadn’t shown up for work that day, and he hadn’t been able to get a reply when he called the house. He was worried about her, he said, but I cut him off. I told him of what had happened the night before, and confessed what I had done. He didn’t seem troubled, or even surprised.

‘They were military?’ he asked.

‘Ex-military, I think, and they knew about Damien. For that reason, I want to believe that they’re not going to cause you trouble, not if you just go back to mourning your son in silence.’

‘Is that what you’d do, Mr. Parker? Is that what you want me to do? Are you going to back away from all this?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Right now, I need some time.’

‘For what?’ But he sounded resigned, as though no answer I could give would be good enough.

‘To find my anger again,’ I said, and maybe, somehow, I gave him the one answer that sufficed.

‘When you do, I’ll be here,’ he said, and hung up.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that chair, but eventually I forced myself to my feet. I had to do something, or else I would sink just as assuredly as if the men at the Blue Moon had released their grip and left me to fall headfirst to the bottom of a container of standing water.

I picked up the phone and called New York. It was time to bring in some serious help. After that, I showered, and I made myself hold my face up to the falling water.

Jackie Garner contacted me an hour later.

‘It looks like Tobias is moving out,’ he said. ‘He’s got a bag packed, and he’s out by his rig, giving it one last check.’

It made sense. They probably figured that they’d scared me enough to proceed with whatever it was they were planning, and they might almost have been right.

‘Stay with him for as long as you can,’ I said. ‘He’s making a run to Canada. You have a passport?’

‘It’s at home. I’ll call Mom. She can bring it to me. Even if Tobias gets on the road, I can stay with him until she catches up. Mom drives like a demon.’

That I could believe.

‘You okay?’ said Jackie. ‘You sound sick.’

I told him the basics of what had occurred the night before, and warned him about keeping his distance from Tobias. ‘When you figure out the route he’s taking, you can pass him and wait for him over the border. Any sign of trouble, you let him go. These guys aren’t screwing around.’

‘So you’re not dropping this?’

‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘In fact, company’s coming.’

‘From New York?’ asked Jackie, and he could barely keep the hope out of his voice.

‘From New York.’

‘Man, wait until I tell the Fulcis,’ he said, and he sounded like a child at Christmas. ‘They’ll be buzzed!’

I knocked three times, waiting a minute or two between each knock, before Karen Emory answered. She was wearing a robe and slippers, her hair was unkempt, and she looked as though she hadn’t slept much. I knew how she felt. She had also been crying.

‘Yes?’ said Karen Emory. ‘What do you-?’

She stopped talking, and squinted. ‘You’re the guy, the one who was at the restaurant,’ she said.

‘That’s right. My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.’

‘Get lost.’

She slammed the door closed, and my foot wasn’t there to stop it. Sticking your foot in someone’s door is a good way to get maimed, or have your toes broken. It’s also trespassing, and I had enough of a reputation with the cops as it was. I was trying to keep my nose clean.

I knocked again, and kept knocking until Karen came back to the door.

‘I’m going to call the cops if you don’t leave me alone. I’m warning you.’

‘I don’t think you’re going to call the cops, Ms. Emory. Your boyfriend wouldn’t like it.’

It was a low blow, but like most low blows, it hit home. She bit her lip. ‘Please, just go away.’

‘I’d like to talk to you for a moment. Believe me, I’m taking more of a chance than you are. I’m not going to get you into any trouble. Just a few minutes of your time is all I ask, and then I’ll be gone.’

She looked past me, checking to make sure that there was nobody on the street, then stepped aside to let me in. The door opened directly into the living area, with a kitchen ahead and stairs to the right, and what looked like the entrance to a basement beneath them. She closed the front door behind me and stood with her arms folded, waiting for me to speak.

‘Can we sit down?’ I asked.

She seemed inclined to say no, then relented and led me to the kitchen. It was bright and cheerful, decorated in whites and yellows. It smelled of fresh paint. I took a seat at the table.

‘You have a nice house,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘It’s Joel’s. He did all of the work himself.’ She leaned against the sink, not sitting, keeping as much distance between us as possible. ‘You say you’re a private detective? I suppose I should have asked for some ID before I let you in.’

‘It’s usually a good idea,’ I said. I flipped my wallet and showed my license to her. She examined it in a cursory way without touching it.

‘I knew your mother a little,’ I said. ‘We went to the same high school.’

‘Oh. My mom lives in Wesley now.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, for want of something better to say.

‘Not really. Her new husband is an asshole.’ She searched in the pocket of her robe and came out with a lighter and a pack of cigarettes. She lit one, then put the pack and the lighter back in her pocket. She didn’t offer one to me. I didn’t smoke, but it’s always polite to ask.

‘Joel says that Bennett Patchett hired you.’ I couldn’t really deny it but, if nothing else, it confirmed that the men at the Blue Moon had spoken to Tobias after last night, and he, in turn, had spoken of it to his girlfriend.

‘That’s right.’

She rolled her eyes in exasperation.

‘He meant well,’ I said. ‘He was worried about you.’

‘Joel says that he doesn’t think I should work there no more. He says I have to quit my job and find another. We had a fight about it.’

She glared at me, the implication being that it was my fault.

‘And what do you say?’

‘I love him, and I love this house. If it comes down to it, there’ll be other jobs, I guess, but I’d prefer to keep working for Mr. Patchett.’ Her eyes grew damp. A tear fell from her right eye, and she rubbed it away hurriedly.

This whole case was a mess. Sometimes that’s just the way things are. I wasn’t even sure why I was here, apart from ensuring that Joel Tobias hadn’t done to Karen Emory what, once upon a time, Cliffie Andreas had done to Sally Cleaver.

‘Has Joel hit you, or abused you in any way, Ms. Emory?’

There was a long pause.

‘No, not like you, or Mr. Patchett, think. We had a big argument a while back, and it got out of control, that’s all.’

I watched her closely. I didn’t think it was the first time that she’d been hit by a boyfriend. The way she spoke suggested that she regarded the occasional slap as an occupational hazard, a downside of dating a particular type of man. If it happened often enough, a woman might start to believe that she was at fault, that something in her, a flaw in her psychological makeup, caused men to respond in a particular way. If Karen Emory wasn’t already thinking along those lines, then she was close to it.

‘Was it the first time that he’d hit you?’

She nodded. ‘It was – what do they say? – “out of character” for him. Joel’s a good man.’ She stumbled a little on the last three words, as though she were trying to convince herself as well as me. ‘He’s just under a lot of stress at the moment.’

‘Really? Why would that be?’

Karen shrugged and looked away. ‘It’s hard, working for yourself.’

‘Does he talk to you about his work?’

She didn’t reply.

‘Is that what you were arguing about?’

Still no reply.

‘Does he frighten you?’

She licked her lips.

‘No.’ This time, it was a lie.

‘And his friends, his army buddies? What about them?’

She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray.

‘You have to go now,’ she said. ‘You can tell Mr. Patchett that I’m fine. I’ll give him my notice this week.’

‘Karen, you’re not alone in this. If you need help, I can put you in touch with the right people. They’re discreet, and they’ll advise you on what you can do to protect yourself. You don’t even have to mention Joel’s name if you don’t want to.’

But even as I spoke, I could see that my words weren’t going to have any effect. Karen Emory had hitched herself to Joel Tobias’s star. If she left him, she’d have to go back to Bennett Patchett’s dorms, and in time another man would come along, one who might be worse than Tobias, and she’d go with him just to escape. I waited for a moment, but it was clear that I was going to get no more out of her. She gestured to the door, and followed me down the hallway. As she opened the front door, and I slipped past her to stand on the front porch, she spoke again.

‘What would Joel do if he knew you’d been here?’ she asked. She sounded like a mischievous child, but it was all bravado. Her eyes were bright with tears waiting to be shed.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but I think his friends might kill me. What are they doing, Karen? Why are they so worried about someone finding out?’

She swallowed hard, and her face crumpled.

‘Because they’re dying,’ she said. ‘They’re all dying.’

And the door closed in my face.

The Sailmaker was still barren of customers as I peered through the glass door, and Jimmy Jewel was still seated on the same stool at the bar, but there were now papers scattered before him, and he was checking figures on a desk calculator.

The light was constantly changing in the bar. Shards of sunlight broke the murk only to be swallowed up again by the movement of the clouds, like shoals of silver fish disappearing into the ocean’s darkness. Although the Sailmaker should have been open for business by now, Jimmy had stopped Earle from unlocking the door. The Sailmaker had inherited some of the habits of the Blue Moon: it might be open before midday, or at five in the afternoon, but it might not. The regulars knew better than to go knocking on the door seeking entry. There’d be a place for them when Jimmy and Earle were ready, and once they were settled in nobody would bother them unless they fell on the floor and made a mess.

But I wasn’t a regular, and so I knocked. Jimmy looked up, considered me for a time while he debated whether or not he could get away with telling me to go play with the white lines on I-95, then gestured to Earle to let me in. Earle did so, then went back to filling the coolers, which didn’t present too much of a challenge since the bar didn’t stock anything that might have counted as exotic when it came to beers. You could still order a Miller High Life at the Sailmaker, and PBR was drunk without a shot of irony on the side.

I took a seat at the bar, and Earle departed to grab a fresh pot of coffee for Jimmy. If I’d drunk as much coffee every day as Jimmy did, I wouldn’t be able to write my name without trembling. On Jimmy, though, it seemed to have no effect. Maybe he had vast reservoirs of calm on which to draw.

‘You know, it seems like only moments since you were last here,’ said Jimmy. ‘Either time is passing more quickly than it should, or you’re just not giving me enough time to start missing you.’

‘Tobias is on the road again, as the song goes,’ I said.

Jimmy kept his eyes on his papers, adding figures and making notes in the margins. ‘Why is this such a beef with you? You work for the government now?’

‘No, I prefer a private pension. As for why this is a beef, I made some new friends last night.’

‘Really? You must be pleased. Strikes me that you could use all the friends that you can get.’

‘These ones tried drowning me until I told them what they wanted to know. Friends like them I can do without.’

Jimmy’s pen stopped moving.

‘And what did they want to know?’

‘They were interested in why I was asking questions about Joel Tobias.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘The truth.’

‘You didn’t feel the urge to lie?’

‘I was too busy trying not to die to make anything up.’

‘So you’ve already been warned off once, and not gently, and you’re still asking questions?’

‘That’s the point. They weren’t polite.’

‘Polite. What are you, a duchess?’

‘There’s also the matter of where they took me to ask their questions.’

‘Which was?’

‘The Blue Moon, or what’s left of it.’

Jimmy pushed the calculator away. ‘I knew you’d bring bad luck with you. I knew it as soon as you walked in that first time.’

‘I think you might have helped by getting in Joel Tobias’s face over in Dewey’s, but, yeah, they connected me to you, or vice versa. Taking me to the Blue Moon was a way of warning us both, except you didn’t get the business end of the message.’

Earle had returned and was now watching us. He didn’t look happy at the return to the subject of the Blue Moon, but it was always hard to tell with Earle. He had a face like a bad tattoo. Jimmy, meanwhile, had gone somewhere else for a time. When he eventually spoke, he sounded tired and old.

‘Maybe I should get out of this business,’ he said.

I didn’t know if he was referring to the bar, or smuggling, or even life itself. He’d get out of them all eventually, if that was any consolation, but I didn’t offer that thought. I just let him talk.

‘You know, I have money tied up in this wharf. I thought it would pay dividends when they started developing it, but now it looks like the only cash I’ll see out of it is the insurance money when it collapses into Casco Bay, and then this place will probably take me with it so I won’t get to enjoy it.’

Then he patted the bar softly and fondly, the way a man might stroke a beloved, if ornery, old dog.

‘I always thought of myself as a gentleman trader,’ he continued. ‘It was a game, moving stuff over the border, trying to steal a nickel or two from Uncle Sam. People got hurt sometimes, but I did my best to make sure that didn’t happen too often. I got into drugs kind of reluctantly, if that makes any sense to you, and I found ways to salve my conscience about it. Mostly, though, if I’m being honest, I don’t think about it, and it doesn’t bother me too much. Same with people, doesn’t matter if they’re Chinamen looking to work in the kitchen of some restaurant in Boston, or whores from Eastern Europe. I’m just the middleman.’ He turned to gauge my response. ‘I guess you think that I’m a hypocrite, or that I’m just fooling myself about all of this.’

‘You know what you are,’ I said. ‘I’m not here to absolve you. I just want information.’

‘Cut to the chase, in other words.’

‘Yes.’

Earle snapped into life and refreshed Jimmy’s coffee, knowing instinctively that his boss now needed his gears oiled. He found a second mug and put it down beside me. I held my hand over it to indicate that I didn’t want any, and thought for a moment that Earle might have been tempted to pour the hot coffee over my fingers, just to let me know that he could care less what I did or didn’t want. In the end, he contented himself with turning his back on me and walking to the far end of the bar, where he retrieved a book from under the counter and began to read, or to pretend to read. It was a Penguin paperback, one of the old black-jacketed classics, although I couldn’t see the name. I’d like to have said that I wasn’t surprised, but I was. Earle didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was big on self-improvement.

Jimmy followed the direction of my gaze.

‘I’m getting old,’ he continued. ‘We all are. There was a time when Earle wouldn’t have picked up a book, not unless it was a phone book and he was trying not to leave bruises on someone, but the years mellow us some, I suppose, in good ways and bad. There was also a time when Earle wouldn’t have been taken so easily by someone like Joel Tobias either, but the guy managed him without blinking. He wanted to, he could have hurt Earle bad. I could see it in him.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘No. He really did just want us to leave him alone, but his needs are irrelevant, you might say. I want to know what he’s doing. It’s important to my business, but it’s also crucial that the existing balance is maintained. The Mexicans, the Colombians, the Dominicans, the Russians, the cops, me, and just about anyone else with an interest in the movement of goods across the border, we all exist in a state of equilibrium. It’s very fragile, and if someone who doesn’t understand the rules starts screwing around with it, then it will all collapse and cause wicked amounts of trouble for everybody. I couldn’t figure out Tobias’s angle, and being out of the loop makes me nervous. So…’

‘So?’

‘So, I could have given customs a heads-up, but never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer when it comes to the law. If it suits me to feed Tobias to them, then I’ll do it, but only when I know what he’s carrying across the border. I’ve called in favors. Every time Joel Tobias gets a job, a copy of the paperwork comes to me. Lately, he’s been working interstate in New England, and it all seems legit. This week, he has a job transporting feed from Canada, and that means a border crossing.’

‘And you have men on him.’

Jimmy smiled. ‘Let’s just say that I convinced some friends of mine to take a closer look at Joel Tobias.’

And that was all I could get from Jimmy Jewel, barring the name of the company in Quebec that was supplying the feed, and the one in Maine that had ordered it, but I believed that it represented a great deal of what he knew about Joel Tobias. He was as much in the dark as I was.

I walked back to my car. The smell of fetid water was in my nostrils again, and on my clothes. I realized that it was coming from the Mustang, which had absorbed some of the stink of the Blue Moon. Then again, I might simply have been imagining it, one more facet of my response to what had taken place.

I drove out to the Blue Moon. I was always going to, eventually. There was an oil drum in the center of the floor, beneath what was left of the charred roof. Insects buzzed above the dark water inside it. I felt the urge to recoil at the sight of it, and I started to breathe faster as my system responded to the memories associated with the smell of this place. Instead, I took my little flashlight from my pocket and searched the ruin, but the men who had brought me there had left no trace of their presence.

Outside, I called Bennett Patchett, and asked him to put together a list of the names of those who had served alongside his son in Iraq and who were now back here, especially those who might have attended his funeral. He told me that he’d do it straight away.

‘So I guess you got your anger back?’ he said.

‘It seems I had untapped reserves,’ I replied, and hung up.

Psychological or not, the Mustang still smelled. I took it to a place in South Portland, Phil’s One-Stop, that usually did a good job, hand washing it instead of using a hose, as a hose found every leak in the seals and made the upholstery so damp that the windows fogged up. They cleaned the Mustang inside and out while I drank a soda, even working at the dirt behind the fenders.

Which was how they found the device.

In the best possible way, Phil Ducasse looked like the kind of guy who ran a one-stop valet and auto repair shop. I don’t think he owned any clothing that didn’t have an oil stain on it somewhere, he showed a five o’clock shadow by midday, and his hands appeared dirty even when they were clean. He was carrying a few pounds of burger weight, and his eyes held the weary impatience of one who would always know more about an engine’s problems than the next guy, and who could fix everything quicker than anyone else if only he had enough time to fix everything, which he hadn’t. Now he used a handheld lamp to point out an object around twelve inches long that was bound with black duct tape and attached to the inside of the fender with a pair of magnets.

‘Ernesto thought it might be a bomb,’ said Phil, referring to the little Mexican who had been working on the car when the device was found. Ernesto was now standing some distance from the auto shop, along with most of the other employees, although nobody had yet called the cops.

‘What do you think?’

Phil shrugged. ‘Could be.’

‘So how come we’re standing here with our noses pressed against it?’

‘Because it probably isn’t.’

‘That “probably” is reassuring.’

‘Why, you think it’s a bomb?’

I looked more closely at the device. ‘From its shape, it seems to be mainly electronic components. I don’t see anything that looks like explosives.’

‘You want to know what I think?’ said Phil. ‘I think you’ve been tagged. It’s a bug.’

It made sense. It could have been placed on my car while I was being questioned at the Blue Moon.

‘It’s big,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t call it inconspicuous.’

‘Inconspicuous enough not to be found unless someone went looking for it. You want to be certain, I can make a call.’

‘Who to?’

‘Kid I know. He’s a genius.’

‘Is he discreet?’

‘You got a wallet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then he’s discreet.’

Twenty minutes later, a young man with bright yellow dreadlocks and a scrawny beard, and wearing a Rustic Overtones t-shirt, arrived on a red Yamaha Street Tracker bike.

‘Seventy-seven,’ said Phil. He was beaming like a proud parent at graduation. ‘XS650, full restoration. I did most of that. The kid helped some, but I bled for that bike.’

The kid’s name was Mike. He was scrupulously polite, and insisted on calling me ‘sir,’ which made me feel I was representing the AARP.

‘Wow, neat,’ he said, when he took his first look at the piece of equipment on my car. He carefully removed it and placed it on a workbench nearby. Using only his fingertips, he traced the outline of each piece of equipment under the tape. He then used a blade to make small incisions in the tape so he could examine what lay beneath. When he was done, he nodded approvingly.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘It’s a tracking device. Pretty sophisticated, although it may not look that way, what with all the tape wrapped around it. Some of this equipment, well, I’d guess that it’s military grade. Could be that the government doesn’t like you.’

He looked at me hopefully, but I didn’t bite.

‘Anyway, whoever put it there probably didn’t have a whole lot of time to work. If he had, he’d have used something smaller that could be hidden more easily, and run it off the car battery so it wouldn’t need its own power supply. To do that, though, you’d need fifteen, twenty minutes to work undisturbed.’

He used a screwdriver to point out a bulge at the center of the device. ‘That’s a GPS receiver, just like the ones used in a regular sat-nav. It pinpoints the car’s location so it can be checked on a PC. There are eight twelve-volt screw terminal batteries at the end providing the power. They’d have to be changed regularly, so if it was part of some long-term surveillance, it would make sense to come back and fit the smaller version to the car battery when the opportunity presented itself, but this baby would still do fine to be getting along with. The magnets wouldn’t affect the reported position, and it would be easy to remove once it had done its job.’

‘Will whoever put it there know that it’s been detached?’

‘I don’t think so. I deliberately didn’t move it far from the car, and I don’t believe the tracking is that sensitive.’

I leaned back against the bench and swore. I should have been more careful. I had kept an eye on my mirrors when I was on my way to visit both Karen Emory and Jimmy Jewel, and had taken a circuitous route with dead ends and U-turns just in case, but had picked up no signs of anyone following me. Now I understood why. In addition, the men who had interrogated me at the Blue Moon now knew that I had been to see both Karen and Jimmy, which meant they were aware that their warnings to back off had fallen on deaf ears.

‘You want me to put it back where you found it?’ asked Mike.

‘You serious?’ said Phil. ‘Maybe he should just strap it to his chest so they can track him around the house as well.’

‘Uh, I don’t think you want to do that, sir,’ said Mike. Sarcasm didn’t seem to have much effect on him, which made me like him more.

I looked out at the lot. A big rig pulled in and flashed its lights for assistance. I thought of Joel Tobias. I wondered where he was now, and what he might be bringing over the border. The rig had Jersey plates. Jersey. Phil followed my gaze.

‘Hey, I don’t know the driver,’ he said. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

Instead of sending the tracking device to Jersey, I told Mike to put the unit back where he’d found it after all. He seemed pleased that I’d managed to catch up with his own thought processes at last: my knowledge of the unit’s presence was a weapon that could be used against whomever put it there, if the right opportunity presented itself.

I paid Mike generously for his time, and he gave me his cell phone number in case I ever needed his help again.

‘Good kid,’ I said, as Phil and I watched him go. ‘Smart too.’

‘My sister’s boy,’ said Phil.

‘He didn’t call you “Uncle Phil.”’

‘I told you he was discreet.’

I also tipped Ernesto. He thanked me, but clearly felt that the shock he’d received merited a bigger tip. Since he hadn’t actually been blown up, I ignored his pained expression.

‘You got any idea who put that thing on your car?’ said Phil.

‘I do.’

‘You figure they’ll come at you?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You got help?’

‘It’s on its way.’

‘It was me, and someone was putting military-grade surveillance packages on my car, I’d want the kind of help with a gun. Is it that kind of help?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s the kind of help with lots of guns.’

10

They hijacked Tobias when he was only a few miles south of Moosehorn on Route 27. A car had been behind him since he’d crossed the border, but he’d paid it little heed. He’d made this run so many times that he’d grown casual: his main concern was the US Customs post at Coburn Gore, and once he passed through safely he tended to switch off. On this occasion, he was also frustrated: he was bringing back only a fraction of what he had anticipated, and he was tired of taking on the burden of these trips alone. As the fatalities had mounted, their group had contracted to its core. It meant more work, and more risk, for everybody, but the rewards would be commensurately greater in the end.

There had been a problem at the warehouse that day. Canadian cops had been crawling all over the neighboring complex as part of a drug operation that was likely to be ongoing for a couple of days, and it seemed unwise to begin moving items within a stone’s throw of the law. Faced with the choice of hanging around, or trying another run when everything was quieter, Tobias had taken the second option. Later, though, he’d berate himself for not being more wary on the journey home, but he’d been assured that Parker had been taken care of, and the tracking device had confirmed that the detective had still been in Portland when Tobias was an hour into his trip.

The detective concerned Tobias, but not as much as Jimmy Jewel did. He’d told the others about Jewel immediately after that first clumsy approach in Dewey’s, and how it looked like he was getting curious about the economics of Tobias’s operation, but they’d advised him to see how it played out. The best that he could do was to convince them to let the operation rest for a time, but as the days passed without incident they grew impatient, and soon he was back on the cross-border run, although for a while they kept tabs on Jimmy and the big elephant who watched his back, but it seemed like Jimmy had decided that Joel Tobias wasn’t worth worrying about. Joel wasn’t so sure, but the others had done their best to convince him otherwise. So with Jimmy apparently minding his own business, and no sign of anyone snooping around, Joel had begun to relax a little.

He was also tired: he was taking on more and more runs as the demand for what they were selling increased. They’d told him that this would happen just as soon as word got around about the quality, and rarity, of what was on offer. Until recently, they hadn’t moved anything that wasn’t already sold, but now Joel was transporting items in anticipation of the final big sale: the ‘fire sale,’ as they had begun to refer to it. They had always known that those initial ‘trickle’ sales might raise warning flags somewhere, but they were necessary to bring in some funds and confirm the value, and extent, of what would ultimately become available. Now the big rewards were in sight, but Joel was the point man, and when Jewel and then the detective had come sniffing, he had been seriously unnerved. His advance payments had already increased substantially, but not as much as Joel would have liked, seeing as how he was taking all of the risks. Words had been exchanged. On top of their initial casual approach to the Jewel business, it had made Joel resentful. He knew that a confrontation was coming. Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut, but deep down he felt that he was right, which was why he’d spoken up to begin with. It took a lot to make Joel mad. He was a simmerer, but when he did go off, then heaven help anyone who got caught by the blast.

He’d also been having more and more bad dreams, and the disruption of his sleep patterns had made him testier with Karen, and he hated that. She was a special girl, and he was lucky to be with her, but sometimes she just didn’t know when to stop asking questions and stay quiet. Ever since Damien Patchett and the rest of them had died, she’d been different, perhaps fearful that the same fate might befall him, but Joel had no intention of taking his own life. Still, Damien’s death had hit him harder than the earlier ones: three of them were dead now, three of his old squad, all by their own hands, but Damien had been the best of them. He always had been.

Damien and the others had started appearing to him in his dreams, bloody and ruined. They spoke to him, but not in English. He couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was as if they had learned a new language on the other side of the grave. But even as he dreamed, he wondered if they were really his old brothers in arms that he was seeing. They scared him, and their eyes were wrong: they were black and filled with fluid, like oily water. Their bodies were warped, their backs hunched, their arms too long, the fingers thin and grasping…

Jesus, no wonder he was tense.

At least the border runs were coming to an end. He’d carefully cultivated the customs officials, and the goons from Homeland Security. His license plate holder identified him as a veteran, as did the stickers and decals in the cab. He wore an army baseball cap, and was careful to listen to the stories from the older veterans who now manned the border. He would slip them a pack of cigarettes occasionally, even playing on his injuries when necessary, and in return they smoothed the way for him. The others had no idea how hard he had worked on his image, and how much the success of their endeavor was dependent upon him.

With all of this on his mind, he hadn’t been paying as much attention as he should have been to the car behind him. When it passed, he was glad to see it go, but that was the rig driver’s natural response to any vehicle that got too close. Eventually, you knew that they were going to try to pass, and you just had to hope that they did it sensibly. Oh, there were truckers who liked playing around with impatient motorists, and others who just took the view that they were the biggest, baddest sons of bitches on the road, and if you wanted to screw around with them, then it was your funeral, sometimes literally. Joel had never been that way, even before he’d started the border runs, where drawing the attention of the law to himself by driving carelessly could see him end up in jail for a long time. Even though there wasn’t much room, and the trees were practically scratching at his cab, he had pulled over slightly to let the car pass. It wasn’t a smart place to pass as they were approaching a bend in the road, and if someone else came at speed from the opposite direction then everyone involved would need as much blacktop as possible if they weren’t all to end up as roadkill. But the way ahead was clear, and he watched the red lights disappear, leaving the road empty and dark.

Half a mile later, he saw the flashing lights, and someone waving a pair of neon glowsticks. He hit the brakes as the beams of his truck caught the yellow Plymouth that had overtaken him earlier. It was side-on, bisected by the white line. Beside it was another car, the one with the flashing red-and-blue lights. He couldn’t make out any markings on it, though, which was odd.

A figure in uniform approached him, its head slightly misshapen. He rolled down the window.

‘What seems to be the problem?’ he asked as a flashlight shone in his face, forcing him to raise his hand to shield his eyes. In that moment, the figure produced a gun, and two other men emerged from the tree line, armed with semiautomatic weapons. Their faces were hidden behind ghoulish masks, and now the man in uniform was pulling a mask down on his face too, but not before Joel got a look at him and thought: Mexican. This was confirmed when the man spoke.

‘Keep your hands where we can see them, buey,’ he said. ‘We don’t want nobody to get hurt. We cool?’

Joel nodded. The fact that they were masked offered him some reassurance that he wasn’t about to be killed. Killers on a lonely road don’t need to worry about being identified by their victim.

‘My friends here are going to get in that cab with you and tell you where to go. Just do as they say, and this will all be over and you can go home to your novia, sí?’ Joel nodded again. So they knew that he had a girlfriend, which meant that they, or someone close to them, had been keeping tabs on him in Portland. He filed that particular piece of information away.

The cab doors weren’t locked. Tobias kept his hands on the steering wheel as the two men climbed in. One slipped into the space behind the seat while the other stayed beside Joel, his body twisted slightly so that he was leaning against the door, the gun resting casually across his thigh. Casual seemed to be the order of the evening, thought Joel, although this changed when the radio of the uniformed man outside crackled into life.

‘Andale!’ he said, waving a hand first at the other vehicles, then at Joel. He pointed his gun at Joel through the windshield to make sure he got the message. ‘Apurate!’ The Plymouth reversed a few feet before heading south. The second car killed its flashing lights as the uniformed man ran back to join it. It pulled over to one side to allow Joel to pass, then fell into place behind him, so that he was hemmed in by both cars.

‘Where am I going?’ he asked.

‘Just watch the road, buey,’ came the reply.

Joel did as he was told, and remained silent. He could have asked them if they knew who they were screwing with, or made some threat of retribution if they didn’t get their asses out of his cab right now and let him go about his business, but he didn’t. All he wanted was to survive this in one piece, with his body and, with luck, his rig intact. Once he was safely back in Portland, he would start making calls, but he was already working on possibilities. If this was a standard hijacking, these guys had either picked the wrong truck or they’d been misinformed, which meant that they were going to score nothing more lucrative than a couple of grand’s worth of dry animal feed. The other option was that this wasn’t a standard hijacking, in which case they were very well-informed indeed, and that could only mean trouble, and possibly pain, for Joel.

Ahead of him, the Plymouth began to signal right.

‘Follow him,’ said the man behind him, and Joel began to slow down in order to make the turn. The road was narrow, and sloped slightly downhill.

‘You want me to fit it through the eye of a needle while I’m at it?’ he asked.

The machine pistol brushed the skin of his cheek lightly, its barrel icy cold.

‘I can drive a truck,’ said a voice. It was so close to his ear he could feel the warmth of the man’s breath on his skin. ‘You don’t want to do it, then I will, but then we got no use for you, mi hijo.’

Joel figured the guy was bluffing, but he wasn’t about to test his theory. He made the turn perfectly, and began following the lights of the Plymouth once again.

‘Hey, you see what you can do with a little encouragement?’ said the gunman.

The Plymouth flashed its warning lights as they pulled into a clearing before a ruined house, its stone chimney still standing intact beside its collapsed roof. There were two more men waiting beside a black SUV. Like the others, they wore masks, but instead of leather jackets they were dressed in suits. Cheap suits, but suits nonetheless. Joel hit the brakes.

‘Get out,’ said the gunman.

Joel did as he was told. The brown car had joined them, and now he and his rig were lit by the headlights of three vehicles. One of the men in suits stepped forward. He was about a foot shorter than Joel, and stocky, but not fat. He stretched out a hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, Joel shook it. The smaller man spoke English with hardly any hint of an accent.

‘You can call me Raul,’ he said. ‘Let’s make this as quick and easy as possible. What have you got in the truck?’

‘Animal feed.’

‘Open it. Let me see.’

With two guns trained on him, Joel unlocked the big double doors. Flashlights shone on the bags of feed, stacked on six wooden pallets. Raul pointed two fingers into the trailer, and two men climbed in with knives and began methodically tearing bags apart, scattering their contents inside the truck.

‘I hope they’re going to clean up after themselves,’ said Joel.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Raul. ‘I guarantee you that, if they don’t find what they’re looking for, you’ll have more significant concerns.’

‘And what are they looking for: more protein in their diet? It’s animal feed. You got the wrong rig, buddy.’

Raul said nothing. He lit a cigarette and offered one to Joel, who declined. Together, the two men watched as bags were cut and searched, until the searchers were standing shin-deep in the mess.

‘It’s a nice rig,’ said Raul. ‘It would be a shame to damage it.’

‘Look, I told you: you got the wrong shipment.’

Raul shrugged. Joel heard movement from behind him. His arms were grasped tightly, and he was forced down on his knees. Raul lit a fresh cigarette and squatted so that he and Joel were face to face. He grabbed a handful of Joel’s hair and placed the tip of the cigarette firmly against Joel’s right cheek, just below the bone. There was no threat, no warning, just intense pain, the smell of burning flesh, and a low sizzling sound that was swamped by Joel’s scream. After a couple of seconds, Raul withdrew the cigarette. The tip was still glowing faintly. Raul blew on it until it was entirely red once again.

‘Listen to me,’ said Raul. ‘We could take your rig apart, piece by piece, and then set it alight before your eyes. We could even kill you, and bury you in the woods. We might not even go to the trouble of killing you before we bury you. All of these options are open to us, but we don’t want to do any of those things, because I don’t yet have a problem with you personally. So here it is: I know you’re smuggling. I want to know what you’re smuggling, so you’re going to show me the traps, and I am going to keep burning you until you do. Now, tell me.’

After the third time, Joel did.

They left him in the clearing. Before he departed, Raul gave Joel a salve for his wounds. The burn on his face was bad; the two to his hands were worse. Raul had placed the cigarette to the skin between the thumb and forefinger on each hand. When that hadn’t worked, he had threatened to put it out in Joel’s right eye, and Joel had believed him. He told them where the trap was, but even after following his instructions they couldn’t find it. It was a professional job, designed to pass undetected during anything but the most painstaking of searches. He was forced to show it to them, first explaining how the seat came apart so that the space, which ran the width of the cab, could be accessed. He then opened it by the careful application of pressure to its two lower corners.

The compartment was capable of being divided into smaller sections, depending upon what was being transported. On this occasion, there was a plastic tool box containing a dozen small cylindrical objects, similar in length to pieces of chalk, and wrapped in layers of cloth and plastic to protect them. The men in the cab handed one of them down to Raul, once it had been stripped of its protection. It was ornately carved, capped with gold at each end and inset with precious stones. Raul held it in the palm of his hand, testing its weight, then asked: ‘What is this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Joel. ‘I’m just the transporter. I don’t ask questions.’

‘It looks old, and valuable.’ Raul held out a hand, and a flashlight was placed in it. He used it to examine the stones more closely. ‘These are emeralds and rubies, and that’s a diamond on the tip.’

The seal in Raul’s hand dated from 2100 BC. It was an ancient bureaucratic device, used to verify business and legal transactions by impressing the seal into documents inscribed on clay tablets. By this point, Joel had seen enough of them to know, but he remained silent.

Carefully, Raul rewrapped the seal, and handed it to one of his men.

‘Take them all,’ he said. ‘And handle them gently.’

He lit another cigarette, and smiled as he saw Joel wince involuntarily.

‘So, you say that you just drive, and you know nothing about the items that you are paid to transport,’ said Raul. ‘I don’t believe you, but that’s of no consequence now. I’m going to ask around about those little cylinders, and if they’re as valuable as they look I may hold on to some of them. You can tell your employers, if that’s what they are, that they may consider it a penalty for attempting to run an operation like this without informing the proper authorities, and by that I don’t mean US Customs. If they want to continue transporting such items, then they should come talk to me, and we’ll work something out.’

‘Why should they talk to you?’ asked Joel. ‘Why not the Dominicans, or Jimmy Jewel?’ He saw something flash in Raul’s eyes, and knew that he’d hit a nerve.

‘Because,’ said Raul, ‘we have the cylinders.’

Then he walked away, leaving Joel to nurse his wounds, but not before stamping Joel’s cell phone into pieces, and draining most of the fuel from his tanks, leaving him with just enough to get to a motel outside of Eustis. The burn to his face attracted a few glances when he entered the lobby, but nobody commented upon it. He found the ice machine, then wrapped some of the ice in a towel from his room and used it to ease the pain in his hands and face before making the call from his room.

‘There’s been a problem,’ he said, when the phone was picked up. He gave a detailed account of all that had occurred, leaving out almost nothing

‘We’ll have to get them back,’ came the reply. ‘You say that this guy Raul wants to keep the seals as some kind of fine?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Jesus. You think he’s going to use them to mark bags of coke?’

‘I think he’s going to try to sell them.’

‘We’ve succeeded so far because we’ve been careful. Those seals can’t turn up on the open market.’

Joel did his best to hide his irritation. Why, just because he drove a truck, was it assumed that he was some kind of moron? After all, he’d been there at every stage of the operation, right from the start. Without him, it would have fallen apart long before now.

‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, and was unable to keep the edge from his voice.

‘Don’t get smart with me. I didn’t lose the consignment.’

‘Yeah, well, I haven’t seen enough cash to compensate me for the removal of an eye.’

‘You’ve seen more up front than anyone else. You don’t like the arrangement, then walk away.’

Joel stared at the wounds on his hands.

‘That’s not what I meant. Let’s just get this mess fixed up.’

‘It won’t take this Raul long to find out what he’s got. After that, a child will be able to piece together what’s happening. I’ll start asking around, find out who he is.’

‘Jimmy Jewel knows.’

‘You sure?’

‘Pretty sure. You ask me, I think the instruction to hit us came from him.’

‘Well, that’s where we’ll start, then. You say they took everything?’

‘Yeah. They got it all.’

‘Go home. Get some sleep, and see to those burns. Call me tomorrow as soon as you’ve rested. This isn’t the only mess that needs to be cleaned up.’

Joel didn’t ask for clarification on the final comment. He was too tired, and too sore. He hung up the phone and walked to the gas station across the road, where he bought a six-pack of beer to drink in his room, occasionally holding one of the cold bottles to his damaged cheek as he stared out of the window at the lights of passing cars, and the darkness of Flagstaff Lake. After two beers, he felt nauseated. It had been so long since he’d experienced shock that he’d almost forgotten the sensation, but what had been done to him in the clearing brought back other memories, other moments. He scratched absentmindedly at his left shin, feeling the scar tissue and the hollow in the muscle. He called Karen but she wasn’t home, so he left a message on the machine telling her that he was tired and had decided to get a room for the night. He also told her that he loved her, and apologized for their fight that morning. The fight was all the detective’s fault; his, and that meddling old bastard Patchett. Tobias knew enough about the detective from local gossip not to underestimate him, and he wasn’t sure that threatening him was the way to deal with him, but he’d been angry as well as relieved when they’d come to him and told him that the detective had been hired to investigate him and his relationship, and not the larger operation.

He wanted to sleep. He popped some painkillers and sat on his bed, his feet stretched before him. He searched in his jacket pocket, and withdrew the two exquisitely carved gold loops. He had said that the Mexicans had taken everything, but he’d lied. He figured he was owed something for his pain, and for the fact that what he had already shipped was worth a fortune, a fortune of which he had yet to see more than a few bucks in real terms. He also wanted to make up to Karen for their fight.

He held the earrings up to the light, and even though in pain, he marveled at their beauty.