The Inn(51)

“I can’t believe this,” I said, rubbing my eyes. I was suddenly exhausted.

“Neither can I,” the doc said a little sadly. When I didn’t respond, he opened his hands, trying to make sense of it. “I wish I had some reason to give you for doing it. Some understandable justification. But I don’t. I’d been bored and lonely for almost two decades. I had enough money to survive comfortably but soullessly. And then someone came to me and said he’d pay me seven thousand dollars a week to sign meaningless little slips of paper. That first night, my head was filled with all kinds of dreams. I’ve been saving for a boat. I’d like to try to sail to Italy. Maybe see the Greek Isles.”

I went to the corner of the porch and breathed slowly and evenly, trying to dissuade my body from reacting as it wanted to. I felt like punching the wall. Picking up the chair I’d been sitting in and smashing it to pieces.

There was also a burning for violence against the doctor himself slithering like poison in my veins. He’d been dreaming of sailing around the Greek Isles while doling out the drugs that had helped kill Marni and countless others. But when I turned back to look at him, all I saw was a good, kind old man who’d done a terrible thing. The same guy who had leaped in to help a would-be assassin bleeding to death on my driveway, a man who had been a slave to his loneliness and purposelessness, just like me.

“What’s your plan?” I asked. “You’ve told me the truth, and you must know I can’t have you living here and doing what you’ve been doing.”

“I’m going to leave.” He nodded. “If Cline doesn’t know I’m with you now, he’ll find out soon enough. I’ll be in danger. I’ve got plenty of money. Give me a couple of days to make arrangements, and then I’ll be out of your life.”

He started to leave, and I turned away, not wanting to watch him go. All that I wanted to say was left unspoken, just like it had been with Marni. Another person I cared about had been stripped from me by Cline’s hand. I made a silent promise that he would be the last.

I’d thought the doc had gone inside, but then I heard his voice behind me as I stood looking out at the water. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry about your friend Malone.”

“What do you mean, you’re sorry about him?” I turned, and the old doctor looked surprised, uncertain. He shrugged a little sadly.

“If you don’t know yet, I shouldn’t be the one to tell you,” he said. He left me standing there, my head full of questions I wasn’t sure I wanted the answers to.





CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT





CLINE WAS POSSESSED by a level of rage that was so hot and wild, he felt like his brain was swelling, like his eyes were bulging from their sockets. He stood in his office looking out over the water, trying to calm himself. Below him, the gardener was just wrapping up for the day, throwing tools into the back of his truck with heavy clunking sounds. Downstairs, some of the clingy idiots drawn in by his money and power were blaring their lazy rap music. The pressure in his skull collected at the top of his spine.

Four of his best men were in the hospital. Bones and Simbo had apparently been beaten silly by the moronic local sheriff. Cline couldn’t believe that. Unless the man had cornered his soldiers unexpectedly and sat on them, Cline didn’t know how to account for Bones’s ruptured kidneys and Simbo’s skull fracture and broken arm. Then there were Turner and Russ, who had approached a houseful of dead-beats and dropouts in the middle of the night and somehow wound up in the back of an ambulance, even though both of them were experienced killers. They’d been foiled by washouts and crazies sleeping in their beds. It was unthinkable.

Cline tried not to let his mind linger on what he had lost on the lobster boat. The fury was making his jaw ache. Between bursts of anger, he had tiny moments of fear, the unmistakable fingers of panic flicking and stroking wires inside his brain. News of a loss this horrendous, this complete, would get around. If Cline didn’t recover quickly, someone would come for him. Cline had men, territory, respect, and he had built his business carefully, but now others might assume he was all fluff, easy prey; everything he had was lying exposed, one of his kingdom’s walls shattered.

Cline walked down the stairs to tell the idiots in the yard to turn off their music. He was going to send them away, this little posse of sycophants Squid had brought to the house months ago who never seemed to leave. There were two girls who were always there, high-school dropouts like Squid most likely, wannabe gangsta bitches Instagramming themselves in his Jacuzzi while drinking his champagne and flashing gang signs. Cline liked having easy pussy around, but he hated their music. In Cline’s day, rap had been about something. The song they were playing as he walked toward the French doors was just a sonic squealing and the word juice whispered over and over.

He stopped just outside the doors when he heard what the girls were discussing.

“ … he was like nothing, man. Like some old cop dude from down Boston way. I seen the fool out here. He was the one put a plant through Cline’s windshield, yo. The crew at his house is all like homeless people and women and retards and shit.”

“And they fought off Russ and Turner? How did they do that?”

“Yeah, man. I don’t know! I heard Russ’s leg was, like, disconnected. Like detached. Some fucked-up cripple, one of the cop’s guys, blew it off with an Uzi.”