The Inn(14)

I wasn’t ready for that and I flinched, but Nick caught the glass an inch from my nose and then smashed it on the countertop, leaving a jagged edge to fight with. I imagined myself doing the same thing but ending up with a fistful of useless shards. Nick didn’t even have to brandish the weapon. The big guy dragged himself up, and the party of losers walked out. There was a promise in the shrimp’s eyes as he glanced back over his shoulder at Mayburn.

The doctor was clutching his chest and gasping as he went to the bar. I helped him onto a stool while Nick went to smooth things over with the bartender before she called the cops.

Mayburn was not a fighting man. His face and neck were flushed, and his hands were shaking. I felt him examining my face.

“Don’t I know you?” Mayburn asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“You sure?”

“I think I’d remember a crazy old-timer who goes around waving knives at punks in bars,” I said. I took the stool beside him, showing him only my profile. “You know that guy, do you?”

“That small one. That’s Rick Craft.”

“Who’s Rick Craft?”

“Google it,” he said, too tired to explain.

I took out my phone as Mayburn recovered. The story I read from the Gloucester Chronicle, the newspaper Susan worked for, made the hairs on my neck stand up.

“‘Two girls, ages three and five, were taken to Lawrence General Hospital in North Andover for suspected poisoning,’” I read. “‘They were pronounced dead on arrival.’”

“They weren’t poisoned,” Mayburn said. “They were Craft’s kids. He’s a long-term addict. Rick and his wife got high and passed out. Left a bunch of pills on the table. The girls took one each, thinking they were candy.”

Nick returned to my side as Mayburn collected himself.

“I’m the medical examiner at Lawrence,” Mayburn said, something I knew but Nick didn’t. “I was there when the girls were brought in. The pills they took were loaded with fentanyl. It’s fifty times more potent than heroin. They never had a chance.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“That bastard”—Mayburn jerked a thumb at the door through which Craft and his cronies had left—“did just ninety days in prison. Pleaded to child endangerment. Ninety days. Can you believe that? I saw the pictures from his house. There were needles all over the floor. He gets child endangerment? It should have been murder.”

Mayburn wiped his face with his hand. I now understood his distress at Craft’s claims that he and his wife were trying for another child. I felt the rage rising fiery and hard, like a heated steel ball stuck in my throat.

“The drugs even looked like candy,” Mayburn said almost to himself, staring into his glass, defeated. “The capsules were bright and colorful with faces printed on them.”





CHAPTER SIXTEEN





CLINE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND it. Gloucester was crawling with seafood. Every morning he suited up head to toe in Nike and ran along the empty gray beach, and everywhere there were crab, lobster, and tuna boats returning from predawn runs. He saw the slippery black heads and flippers in the boats’ wake, seals that trailed the vessels for scraps and throwbacks. And yet despite that, there was only this one sushi place in town, and it was a dump.

He sat at the windows of the restaurant with his men, gazing at the fading light on the water, his nose wrinkling at the smell from the kitchen. Unchanged industrial fryers, the tang of tartar sauce and lemon. The wine, at least, was passable. He’d certainly been less comfortable than this for much longer in his life.

Attempting to spread the business in the north, Cline had done all he could to make himself comfortable in seaside Shitsville until he could get boys on every corner, a morgue full of bodies, a police force under his thumb, and a steady population of clients buying his product. As soon as Cline was satisfied, he would be out of here, taking the virus north to cities that better suited his tastes. He had his eye on Portland next. There was great sushi in Portland.

Town by town, higher and higher, Cline planned to spread his business. He was building a franchise. He established control of a town, trained his managers, handed over the reins, and then moved on. Gloucester was a prize Cline had wanted for quite a while. It was untouched territory. Terra nullius. A couple of times in Boston, Cline had had to squash local competition and deal with the problems they’d left behind. Resentful cops who were impossible to bend. Burned politicians and judges. Old junkies with high tolerances who couldn’t be fed economical, low-percentage product. But Gloucester would be Cline’s jewel. His chance to establish things just the way he liked. He’d thought about opening a sushi place here, just to make it tolerable.

Someone shouted something, interrupting a brief by his man Turner that he’d hardly been listening to, and when Cline looked up, he saw a furious late-middle-aged white woman leaving her table and coming over to their booth. One of the locals, he assumed, judging by the stretched neck of her Walmart T-shirt, the bottle dye job, the eighties ice-blue eye shadow. Cline sipped his wine, steeling himself.

“You.” The woman pointed across the table at him, ignoring Russ, Turner, and Bones. “I know who you are.”

The woman was spitting as she talked. Cline glanced at the table from whence she’d come and saw the remains of battered-shrimp cocktails, wilted salads. A beer-bellied man cowering in embarrassment and a toddler in a filthy high chair smearing itself and everything within reach with ketchup.