The Inn(10)

I knew exactly how Marni spent her free time, and it was worrying enough without the drugs. She fit right in with a posse of similarly badly dressed mopey teens who had body parts dripping with piercings or crisscrossed with free tattoos they got from local apprentices practicing in their mothers’ garages. From what I could tell, they did the kind of things I did when I was their age. Smashed the windows of abandoned houses. Sat around campfires on the beach talking trash. Threw bottles off the break wall into the water. Kids who, in a couple of years, would either straighten right out or flush their futures gleefully down the toilet.

“I’m not talking weed and whip-its,” I told her. “I’m talking about the hard stuff. This here?” I showed her the capsule. “This did about ten thousand bucks’ worth of damage to a lady’s house this morning and almost got me a kitchen knife in my forehead.”

“I don’t know anything about it, man.” Marni waved me off. “I work at a pizza shop. Everybody there is on something. How do you think they don’t go nuts with the sheer mindlessness of it all?” She stuck her chin out, made sleepy eyes. “Thin crust. No anchovies. Double cheese. Thin crust. No anchovies. Double—”

“Not you, though, right?”

“Oh, of course not.” She rolled her eyes. I got an itchy, unsettled feeling in my chest. I wanted to come down hard on Marni, tell her all the things Siobhan would have told her if she were alive: that she was too smart to spend the rest of her life wearing a Dough Brothers uniform by day and wasting her time with losers and washouts at night. But I knew too much of that would only push her away. I decided I would keep a closer eye on her, even if I had to do it covertly. Marni was on the edge, and the smallest breath of wind could blow her into a dark place. I had to keep a grip on Siobhan’s little cousin.

“Well, then, I suppose if you’ve never bought any drugs, you don’t know how to call up for some,” I said, pulling the piece of paper with the phone number out of my pocket. Marni looked at the number with interest, then her big eyes flicked back to me, suspicious.

“I need someone with a young voice,” I said. “You ever take a drama class?”





CHAPTER ELEVEN





THE BOY WAS sitting on a wooden ledge outside Dogtown Used and Unusual Books, watching the crowds go by and sucking on a lollipop. A section of Gloucester’s main road had been shut down for a street festival, and the curb was lined with carts selling lobster rolls, corn dogs, and ice cream. There were photography stalls selling sunset shots of the boats in the harbor. Nick and I observed the skinny kid in oversize clothes as we stood behind a stand selling nautical antiques, the jumble of polished brass navigation equipment and salt-encrusted buoys providing cover. Marni was casually flipping through tiles painted with colorful starfish on the counter of the stall. She glanced over at the boy when we pointed him out.

“Oh, him?” She laughed. “Can’t be him. That’s Squid. I went to school with that guy.”

“Makes sense,” Nick said. “Get a kid to deal to kids. He can walk among them without standing out.”

“Why do you say it can’t be him?” I asked Marni.

“Because Squid’s an idiot. He got expelled for putting a dead squid in the principal’s Lexus. The guy left his sunroof open. It was a hot day, too, and he didn’t get back out to his car until the afternoon.” Marni smirked. “I wonder how much it cost him to get that reek out of his car.”

“Where did he get the squid?” Nick asked.

“Science class. It was marine-life week.”

“Send him a message,” I said, keeping my eyes on the boy. “He’s standing where the guy said he’d be. It’s got to be him.”

Marni took her phone out and texted, and we watched as the kid patted his jeans and then took a phone out of his pocket.

“It’s him. All right, get out of here,” I told Marni. “I’ll see you back at the house.”

“No way, man,” Marni whispered. “I want to watch.”

“I said move it.” I pointed to the end of the street. Marni sulked off, and Nick and I approached the skinny kid sitting in front of the bookstore. I felt like a bully walking up to the weedy nerd in the schoolyard. The boy looked almost emaciated, he was so thin. Nick could have cracked him over his knee as easily as a broom handle. But I knew that what he had been spreading around was dangerous, lethal stuff. I had to put a stop to it now, before this young man spread his product farther through the neighborhood.

As we got closer, I saw that there was a black backpack over his shoulder, wedged between the kid and the front window of the store.

“Hey, punk,” Nick started. I braced myself to take off in case the kid ran, but he just looked at Nick lazily.

“’Sup, bro?”

“What’s up is you’re peddling toxic shit to schoolkids.” I grabbed the boy’s backpack and lifted him to his feet with it. “You don’t do that in our town.”

“Your town?” Squid grinned, then shifted the lollipop from one cheek to the other. I could see that most of his teeth were black. “Who the fuck are you? You ain’t the police. What, you think you got the local operation around here?”

“No, we’re not drug-dealing scum like you.” Nick pushed the kid hard enough that he thumped into the glass of the bookstore window. It was an old trick. Never let the perp get his balance. “We want you out of here.”